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After Dogmatic Theology, What? 

MATERIALISM, 

OR 

A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY AND NATURAL 
RELIGION. 

s 

GILES B. STEBBINS, 

DETROIT, MICHIGAN. 

EDITOR AND COMPILER OF " CHAPTERS FROM THE BIBLE OF THE AGES," 

AND "POEMS OF THE LIFE BEYOND AND WITHIN." 



"AH that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded 
on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts." — Buddha. 

"God is the original life and force of all things." — Plato. 

" Physiology reduces man to a jelly ; Psychology lifts him to immortality." 

"Sweet souls around us watch us still; 
Press nearer to our side; 
Into our thoughts, into our prayers, 
With gentle helpings glide." 

Harriet Beecher Stowe.- 

n \ 



BOSTON : 
COLBY AND RICH, PUBLISHERS, 

9 Montgomery Place. 

1880. 



<]h 






COPYRIGHT, 

18S0, 
By Giles B. Stebbesb. 



Stereotyped at the Boston Stereotype Foundry, 
19 Spring Lane. 



DECAY OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY: 
WHAT NEXT? 



1 The monstrous blasphemy of creeds 

Which represent an angry God, 
Who tempts man sorely through his needs, 

And meets his feelings with a rod — 
Eternal wrath, through blood appeased, 

The curse of God, salvation's plan, 
Are nightmare visions, which have seized 

The stumbling consciousness of man. 



The pure fresh impulse of to-day, 

Which thrills within the human heart, 
As time-worn errors pass away, 

Fresh life and vigor shall impart." — Lizzie Doten. 

THE power and sway of dogmatic theology are on the 
decline. Its assumptions, that creeds and books are 
authority, more sacred than the truths of the soul and of 
Nature, that belief in dogmas is the only means of salva- 
tion, and that there can be no religious life outside its nar- 
row limits, are to die as the soul asserts itself, and as 
rational knowledge increases. By slow but sure degrees it 
fails and weakens. It grows spasmodic in action, rushes 
into " revivals of religion," goes into a chill after the revival 
fever is over, halts in doubt yet weakens continually. Men 
and women hunger for some bread of life it cannot give ; 
crushed and darkened minds seek liberty and light ; the 
thoughts of men grow and broaden be3^ond dogmas, Pagan 
or Christian. The demand for religious liberty is quick- 

3 



4 DECAY OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY: 

ened with the demand for personal and political liberty. 
Man is no longer the tool and creature of institutions, in 
State or Church. They are made by him : if they help and 
serve him it is well ; if not, ' ' the breath that made can 
unmake." No divinity hedges around Bishop or parish 
minister, book or doctrine. No " thus saith the Lord " can 
enslave men ; thought must be untrammeled bj r external 
and arbitrary limitations that our ideals of life may enlarge. 
The best people in the churches care least for dogmas, the 
best preachers say least about them ; in good time they will 
die out. Dogmatism is not religion. When creeds are 
forgotten and Bibles are helps, valuable yet human and fal- 
lible, there will be more "peace on earth and good will 
among men" than now. We can see already that the 
growth of spiritual freedom brings more healthful and nat- 
ural piet} T . 

Psychological study reveals the wide sweep of man's 
spiritual relations and the splendor of human powers and 
possibilities, while Science questions Nature for fact and 
law. Dogmatic theology offers only the crude systems of 
a darker Past, and the poor stories of miracles wrought by 
an arbitrary power above law, — all to be believed, even if 
reason rebels and conscience abhors. We have the suprem- 
acy and sanctity of the soul, its instinctive call for "Light, 
more light ! " and the grand search of Science, wide as the 
world and through stars and suns ; while troops of bigots 
hold up all manner of holy books and conflicting dogmas, 
and vex the air with their senseless yet cruel outcries, — 
"Believe and be saved. He that believeth not shall be 
damned." It is a growth more than a contest. With far 
less warfare of words than of old we are leaving these 
dwarfing finalities beneath us. ' We move on and toss back 
our broken fetters, not caring to dispute about the stuff 
they are made of. 



WHAT NEXT? 5 

In a late number of an influential London magazine, the 
Contemporary Review, its editor, JohnMorley, tells " How 
Dogma is to disappear before Truth." In clear and forcible 
language he gives, not only his own views, but those of 
many able leaders of English thought. 

"The growth of brighter ideals and nobler purposes will go on, leaving 
ever and ever farther behind them your dwarfed finality and leaden moveless 
stereoscope. We shall pass you on your flank ; your fiercest darts will only 
expend themselves upon air. We will not attack you, as Voltaire did ; we 
will not exterminate you ; we shall explain you. History will place each 
dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as 
the naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction it will sink 
to a curiosity. From being a guide to millions of human lives it will dwin- 
dle down to a chapter in a book. As history explains your dogma, so sci- 
ence will dry it up. The conception of law will silently take the place of 
the conception of the daily miracles of your altars,' which will seem impos- 
sible. The mental climate will gradually deprive your systems of their 
nourishment, and men will leave your system, not because they have con- 
futed it, but because, like witchcraft and astrology, it has ceased to interest 
them." 

Matthew Arnold in England, one of the earnest and able 
defenders of the Bible and of Christianity, a man of truly 
catholic spirit, and who aims to be broad and generous in 
his ideas, in his Last Essays on Church and Religion, says : 

" The partisans of traditional religion in this country do not know, I 
think, how decisively the whole force of progressive and liberal opinion on 
the Continent has pronounced against the Christian religion. They do not 
know how surely the whole force of progressive and liberal opinion in Eng- 
land tends to follow, so far as traditional religion is concerned, the opin- 
ion of the Continent. They dream of patching up things unmendable, of 
retaining what can never be retained, of stopping change at a point where 
it can never be stopped. The undoubted tendency of liberal opinion is to 
reject the whole anthropomorphic and miraculous religion of tradition as 
unsound and untenable. On the Continent such opinion has rejected it 
already. One cannot blame the rejection. 'Things are what they are,' and 
the religion of tradition, Catholic or Protestant, is unsound and untenable. 
A greater force of tradition in favor of religion is all which now prevents 
the liberal opinion of England from following the Continental opinion. 
That force is not of a nature to be permanent, and it will not, in fact, hold 
out lona - ." 



6 DECAY OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY: 

For England say America, ami these calm words of timely 
warning will apply here as well. No mountain range or 
sea can bar or check the progress of this " liberal opinion," 
the tendency of which, here as across the broad Atlantic, 
is to reject the " miraculous religion of tradition as unsound 
and untenable." 

Arthur Peurhyn Stanle} 7 , D.D., Dean of Westminster, an 
eminent- and eloquent preacher in the English Episcopal 
church, came to our country a year ago, and his words here 
show the tendency of his thought to a broader charity and 
fraternity. A published volume of his American discourses 
is quoted from. Addressing the Episcopal clergy of New 
England, he said : 

" The crude notions wliieh prevailed twenty years ago on the subject of 
Bible inspiration have been so completely abandoned as to be hardly any- 
where maintained by theological scholars The doctrine of the Atone- 
ment will never again appear in the crude form common both in Protestant 
and Catholic churches in former times. A more merciful view of future 
punishment and of a hope of a universal restitution have been gradually 

advancing, and the darker view gradually receding The question 

of miracles has reached this point — that no one would now make them the 

chief or sole basis of the evidence of religious truth I am persuaded 

that what is called Liberal Theology is the backbone of the Church of Eng- 
land, and will be found to be the backbone of its daughter church in 
America." 

To the students of Union Theological Seminary in New 
York, under Presbyterian care, he said : 

" Do let me entreat you to look facts in the face, whether the facts of the 
Bible, of science, or of scholarship. Do not be afraid of them. Compare 
the sacred volumes of the Old and New Testaments with the sacred vol- 
umes of othev religions. Make the most searching investigation, with light 
from whatever quarter, as to the origin of the sacred books." 

On The Conditions of Religious Inquiry he writes : 

" The most excellent service that churches aud pastors, authorities of State 
or of religion, universities or teachers, can render to the human reason in 
this arduous enterprise is, not to restrain or to blindfold it, but to clear aside 
every obstacle, to open wide the path, to chase away the phantoms that 
stand in the road. Above all, it is alike the high calling of true philosophy 



"WHAT NEXT? 7 

and Christian civilization to rise beyond the reach of the blinding, bewilder- 
ing-, entangling influence of the spirit of party This spirit of com- 
bination for party purposes, and this alone, is what the New Testament calls 
' heresy.' This it is that constitutes the leading danger of synods and coun- 
cils, which, by their very constitution, become almost inevitably the organs, 
never of full and impartial truth, almost always of misleading ambiguities 
which tend rather to darkness than to light, rather to confusion than to 
union." 

Speaking on The Nature of Man in a New York pulpit, 
his word was : 

"When the Apostles declared, and when we after them declare, that we 
must obey God rather than man, it was not the repudiation of the laws of 
ruler or magistrate ; it was then the assertion of the supremacy of conscience 
against the authority of a Sanhedrim of priests and scribes, as it still may 

be against the authoritj' of a Pontiff, a Synod, or a Council It is 

this doctrine also of the superiority of the spiritual nature of man above his 
physical frame which, as it is our safeguard against the materialism of the 
scientific lecture-room, is also our safeguard against the materialism of the 
altar and the sacristy. Such -a materialism has pervaded many ages and 

minds "When for a thousand years the Christian church believed 

that the eternal weal or woe of human beings depended on the immersion 
of the human body or sprinkling the forehead in a baptistery or a font of 
water ; when the regeneration of nations, in the Middle Ages, or even in the 
seventeenth century, was supposed to depend on the possession of a dead 
bone or a fragment of wood ; when Dodwell maintained that the soul wa3 
mortal, and that none but bishops had the powe* of giving it ' the Divine 
immortalizing spirit;' when a celebrated English uivine maintained, some 
fifty years ago, that the ordinary means by which a human being acquired 
immortality was by physically partaking of the bread and wine of the Eu- 
charist, — these were all so many attempts to sink the spiritual in the mate- 
rial, to resolve the spirit of man into the material particles of meat and 
drink, of inanimate substances, and of things that perish with the using. 
.... Whenever, whether in Catholic or Protestant, in heathen or Chris- 
tian lands, the irrational, the magical, the inanimate, gives place to the rea- 
sonable, the holy, and the living service of the human soul to God, — there, 
from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, the pure sacrifice, 
the true incense, is offered, by which alone man can hope to prevail with his 
Maker." 

These significant utterances, corning from one standing 
in such high place in the church, need no comment. Plainly 
enough they point toward the supremacy of the soul and 
the authority of conscience over dogmas, and to a world- 



8 DECAY OE DOGMATIC THEOLOGY : 

wide recognition of truth, wherever found. So runs and 
swells the tide. What poor hand of bigot can stop it? 

Thoughtful and sagacious men in the pulpits see this turn 
of the tide, and sometimes sadly and frankly tell why it 
sets away from their churches. Rev. David Watson, a 
Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, in a discourse to the Young 
Men's Christian Association of Paisley, said : 

" The great, the wise, the mighty are not with us The best thought, 

the widest knowledge, and the deepest philosophy have discarded our 

church. They detest what they call the inhumanities of our creed 

They step out into speculative atheism, for they can breathe freer there. 
.... They are instinctively religious, despite their renunciation of our 
theological creed. They are big with a faith in the ultimate salvation of 
man, — a faith that inspires them to toil, and shames our whining cant. And 
yet these men — the master-minds and imperial leaders among men — the 
Comtes, the Carlyles, the Goethes, the Emersons, the Humboldts, the Tyn- 
dalls, and Huxleys, if you will, — are called atheists by us, are pilloried in 
our Presbyterian orthodoxy as heretics before God and man. Why are such 
as these outside the pale of the Christian Church ? Not that they are unfit, 
we own that, but we are unworthy of them, and by the mob force of our 
ignorant numbers have driven tbem out. They shun us because of our 
ignorant misconceptions and persistent misrepresentations of heaven and 
man and God.'' 

He speaks of the scholarly and cultivated. How it is 
with large classes of the working people in England wemaj 1, 
learn from high authority. In an official report on religious 
worship, made December 8, 1853, to the Registrar-General 
of England, we read : 

" There is a sect, originated lately, called ' Secularists,' their chief tenet 
being that, as the fact of a future life is (in their view) susceptible of some 
degree of doubt, while the fact and necessities of a present life are matters 
of direct sensation, it is prudent to attend exclusively to the concerns of that 
existence which is certain and immediate, not wasting energies in prepara- 
tion for remote and merely possible contingencies. This is the creed which, 
probably with most exactness, indicates the faith which, virtually though 
not professedly, is held by the masses of our working •population." 

And the writer adds, speaking specially of artisans and 
other workmen : 



WHAT NEXT ? 9 

" It is sadly certain that this vast, intelligent, and growingly important sec- 
tion of our countrymen is thoroughly estranged from our religious institu- 
tions in their present aspect." 

In our own land we find an able clergyman, Rev. R. S. 
Storrs, of Brooklyn, L. I., in a Young Men's Christian 
Association meeting in 1872, speaking of " a fatal tendency 
to skepticism and unbelief which threatens to sap the foun- 
dations of society itself. It pervades the literature of the 
day ; it stands behind our science ; and it is broadly pro- 
claimed from the rostrum." 

Rev. Phillips Brooks, of Boston, a gifted and eminent 
Episcopalian, has an article in the Princeton Review of 
March, 1879, on The Pulpit and Modern Skepticism, in 
which he sa} T s : 

"Doubts are thick around us in our congregations, and thicker still, out- 
side in the world. Skepticism is a very pervading thing. It evidently can- 
not be shut up in any guarded class or classes Ideas change and 

develop in all sorts and conditions of men ; the occupants of pulpits have 

their doubts and disbeliefs as well as others A large acquaintance 

with clerical life has led me to think that almost any company of clergymen, 
talking freely to each other, will express opinions which would greatly sur- 
prise, and at the same time greatly relieve, the congregations who ordina- 
rily listen to these ministers Plow many men in the ministry to- 
day believe in the doctrine of verbal inspiration which our fathers held, and 
how many of us have frankly told the people that we do not believe it ? . . . . 
How many of us hold the everlasting punishment of the wicked is a clear 
and certain truth of revelation ? But how many of us who do not hold it 
have ever said a word ? . . . . There must be no lines of orthodoxy 
inside the lines of truth. Men find that you are playing with them, and will 

not believe you, even when you are in earnest The minister who 

tries to make people believe that which he questions, in order to keep 
them from questioning what he believes, knows very little about the certain 
workings of the human heart, and has no real faith in truth itself. I think 

a great many teachers and parents are now in just this condition 

It is a most dangerous experiment." 

Such testimonies, from such sources, are significant. 
They show, the prevalence of doubt even in "orthodox" 
quarters, and they show too that theological dogmatism is 
a crime against humanity. 



10 DECAY OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY: 

It may be said: "Creeds are only statements of opin- 
ion ; and may not men put their convictions on record ? 
Is it not their duty to do so?" Certainly, men should state 
their opinions with all sincerity, and such statements should 
command respect, even if we do not agree with them. It 
is indeed a duty to uphold and stand for our convictions, 
and any one with depth of soul and character must wish to 
convert others. Whoever is inspired by spiritual ideas 
must, in some way, be a missionary. Each man's creed 
may be such glimpse as he can get of eternal verities. But 
shall no one else see more ? Must all look through the dis- 
torted haze of his poor glass ? Can he, or they, get no 
clearer sight? Dogmatic and pharisaic creed-makers say, 
No. Their method is to formulate a rigid statement of doc- 
trines, based on their interpretation of a book, and to 
demand that all shall believe it for all time ; to denounce or 
craftily slander and depreciate those who cannot honestly 
• accept their statements ; to make belief of more conse- 
quence than life, and so lift creed above deed. They put 
the arbitrary authority of dogma and book above the truth 
as soul and mind see it, and as Nature teaches it, and so 
aim to fetter and hold back the spiritual progress of man- 
kind, lest that progress should make their creeds effete and 
powerless. This method must be left behind, this spirit 
must go the way of all evil. 

This is the clay of image-breakers. Idols are cast 
down, be they graven images or printed books. The Age 
of Reason and the Mistakes of Moses will be read. 
Broader criticisms, more just some may think, 3 7 et more 
searching, will command attention. The Bible, as Divine 
and infallible authority, will pass away. How, then, shall 
we rate or value that collection of Hebrew books ? What 
of its wondrous visions and revelations ? Shall our mode 
of thinking give us any key to its real spiritual significance ? 



WHAT NEXT? 11 

Shall we smite down the idols and sit satisfied among the 
fallen ruins, or gather them up for stones in the walls of 
fair and free temples where all the people shall come for 
light and truth and growth? 

Fashions or habits of thought change. The habit of 
thinking grows into a method, which the multitude follow, 
as they do the prevalent style of coat or dress, until new 
elements and ideas come in, and a new method and fashion 
supplants the old. The dogmatic fashion was to make the 
creed or the book the basis and standard, to start from that 
as a settled matter, not to be questioned. The Quaker, and 
transcendental, fashion, never, so widely prevalent, is to 
make the soul — ' ' the voice within " — the basis and stand- 
ard. The scientific fashion, now quite prevalent, is to look 
at the facts of external nature, and outward experience as 
the standards, and well-nigh ignore the soul. This belittles 
an important element — the inner life — but it aims to put 
the process of law in place of parchment authority. All 
these fashions may be criticised, but, for the present pur- 
pose, it is enough to say that the first is passing away. 
Christ was no dogmatist, rather a transcendentalist indeed, 
when he said, "For behold the kingdom of heaven is 
within; " and, " Why judge ye not even of yourselves, what 
is right." The sectarian churches do not follow this method, 
are not possessed and inspired by this spirit of him whom 
they claim as teacher and guide. No dogmatic creeds were 
framed, no war of bigots was opened, until long after the 
sad scene in the garden of Gethsemane, and the sweet 
prayer from the cross at Calvary : " Father, forgive them, 
they know not what they do." 

Old as history indeed is this protest against dogmatism. 
Each great religious teacher and reformer is a breaker of 
fetters so long as he follows the inspiration of his enlarged 
thought, for it points above all written authority, and recog- 



12 DECAY OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY: 

nizes the sanctity and supremacy of the soul. Luther 
made all Europe ring with his protest against the authority 
of the church over the conscience of man, and was " mighty 
to the pulling down of strongholds " so long as he held to 
that idea. When he began to dogmatize and persecute, 
Protestantism made no more gains. Twenty-five hundred 
years ago, as old Asiatic story, mingled of myth and fact, 
tells us, Gautama-Buddha sat under the sacred Bodhi-tree, 
in meditation seeking Truth. Mara the Prince of Darkness 
sent strong enemies and crafty tempters to affright and con- 
found him, and among them, as Edwin Arnold tells us in 
his great poem, " The Light of Asia," came — 

" She who gave dark creeds their power, 
Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress, 
Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith, 
But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers ; 
The keeper of those keys which lock the Hells 
And open Heavens. ' Wilt thou dare,' she said, 
' Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods, 
Unpeople all our temples, shaking down 
That law which feeds the priests and props the realms ? ' 
But Buddha answered, ' What thou bidd'st me keep, 
Is form which passes, but the free truth stands ; 
Get thee unto thy darkness.' " 

Each sect has its fragment of truth, but dogmatists de- 
mand that we must take that fragment, and their errors with 
it. To reach out for more truth, to sift out error, or to 
doubt a dogma, is heresy ; and the orthodox sinner has a 
better chance for heaven than the white-souled saint who is 
a heretic. As creed and book are lifted up to be idolized, 
sacrilege is committed against the soul : this is the ' ' sin 
against the Holy Ghost," — the sacred and living spirit 
within us. 

But vital questions come up at this transition period, 
which is not without its perils. What shall come in place 
of dogmatic theology ? What ideals and inspirations shall 



WHAT NEXT? 13 

help us when these " old things" have passed away? How 
can we keep the good and reject the ill of the Past? What 
gleam of truth, what sanctity of devoted suffering for the 
good of others, may we find, for instance, in Trinity and 
Atonement, and how lift off the clouds and put aside the 
revolting and demoralizing perversions ? Can we be wise 
thinkers as well as free thinkers, and so reach up to some- 
thing better? What of Science in its present aspects? 
May not its methods be imperfect and lead to false con- 
clusions ? Is there a scientific dogmatism akin to that of 
sectarian theology ? There is too much loose and superfi- 
cial thinking and shallow negation among those who have 
cast off the bondage of creeds. We have made encour- 
aging progress, but we need to survey the field and gain 
more clear and definite aims and ideals. Free thought is 
precious, but we need wisdom to make best use of our free- 
dom. Let a foolish man take his own way and he stum- 
bles into strange pitfalls, while a wiser traveler is safe. 

Plainly enough the day of dogmatic theology is passing 
away. Let us rejoice at that. What next? is the impor- 
tant question. What ideas of life and destiny and Deity 
shall give hue and shape to the thought of coming time ? 
As we pass out from the realm of a decaying dogmatism, 
two paths open before us. One leads to Materialism, — 
the potency of matter ; mind and soul but fine and tran- 
sient results of the chemistry of digestion ; the negation 
of personal immortality and of a Supreme Intelligence. The 
other leads to Spiritualism, using the word in a broad 
sense, — the potency in matter, guided and governed by 
the indwelling Soul of Things ; man " an intelligence served 
hj bodily organs," a spirit clad in flesh, catching glimpses 
of the life beyond. These differ and diverge widely ; they 
are indeed opposite to each other. Their differing ideals 
and methods may act as mutual corrective and counter- 



14 DECAY OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY: 

poise, and as stimulus to inquiry and criticism ; yet that 
which is most true must and will bear sway at last, and 
must be in accord with man's best development and finest 
culture. Let us look at both, and seek answers to these 
pressing and vital questions by fair statement and criti- 
cism. John Stuart Mill has well said, "He who knows 
only his own side of the case knows little of that." Is a 
Spiritual Philosophy or a Material Philosophy to rule the 
world ? What will be the tendency and result of the one 
or the other ? These are the great religious and scientific 
questions of our day. In examining them let us remember 
that good men and women, orthodox and heterodox, mate- 
rialists and spiritualists, have led true lives, and done noble 
work, and been royally faithful to their best light of creed 
or no creed, and so avoid the old folly of judging persons 
by their theories rather than by their lives. Yet we must 
look at the tendencies of systems of thought, and seek the 
best as help and inspiration to the best practical conduct, 
the wisest reforms, the richest enjoyment and the noblest 
heroism. With the growth of man to a higher and larger 
life, shall we be materialists or spiritual thinkers? 



MATERIALISM.- NEGATION. 

INDUCTIVE SCIENCE, EXTERNAL AND DOGMATIC. 

"High up in the air, all blackened and bare, 
Still rises the Castle of Doubt, 
And the Giant, I trow, sbould you seek for him now, 
You will find him still prowling about." — Doten. 

1HEOLOGICAL dogmatists have said a great deal of 
the law of God, — not law universal and inherent, 
but the arbitrary decrees of an Oriental Sovereign, written 
in a book. Criticism shows that there is no reasonable 
certainty as to the age, or authorship, or compilation of 
this volume, and that it is contradictory as to facts and 
morals, and so men doubt both book and decrees. They 
have told us of a Being, sitting on a distant throne, build- 
ing worlds as a carpenter builds houses, and enacting an 
occasional miracle-play at the expense of natural law, to 
show his power, or reward his friends, or punish his ene- 
mies. In our day the great lesson is that The Reign of 
Law is everywhere, in and through all things, and so this 
old conception of a God, outside of the world and regard- 
less of the eternal process of natural law, is dying out. 

We have had glowing pictures of a heaven for the few, 
narrow, exclusive, and selfish, and of a place of eternal and 
hopeless torture and despair for the many. Death has been 
"the king of terrors," the grave "a bourne from whence 
no traveler returns," the future life a realm shut off from 
us, and of which we could have no reliable knowledge, — 

15 



16 MATERIALISM. — NEGATION. 

save through the words of one ancient hook, — but only 
such hopes and dreams as the soul will cherish. 

The saving of our souls in that nrysterious other world 
has been held of more consequence than the care and cul- 
ture of mind and body here, and the belief in certain 
dogmas of hell, devil, and Jewish Jehovah, and in demoral- 
izing mysteries like the vicarious atonement, of higher mo- 
ment than the noblest conduct of our lives on earth. 
These views, so arbitrarily imposed, are fading away, and 
it is no wonder that many grope in the dark as they look 
toward the grave, or that brave and strong hearts prefer 
the good work to be done here and now, to the cold and 
narrow intolerance and the irrational lifting of creed above 
deed, that is said to send modern Pharisees into Paradise. 

Modern materialism is the reaction against supernatural- 
ism. Atheism and the doubt of immortalit}* are the rebel- 
lion against " the wrath of God," and the horrible injustice 
of an endless hell. The present methods and spirit of 
Science, inductive and external, tend in the same direction. 
Hudson Tuttle has well said : 

"Atheism is a mental state into which some of the most profound thinkers 
fall. The student of nature cannot avoid, if he logically follows the views 
science at present entertains, arriving at its goal. This tendency has long 
been foreseen by the theological world, which, in various ways, has sought 
to arrest its progress. The shafts hurled by dogmatic believers have always 

rebounded against themselves Science is an interpreter of the 

senses, and to them the phenomena attending the death of man and of ani- 
mals are apparently the same. The processes of decay destroy their bodies, 

resolving them into identical elements A living being represents a 

balance of the forces of decay and renovation. In the maturing organism 
the latter predominates ; in age, the former rule with constantly increasing 
power until they gain the victory in death." 

Science gives us truths of great value in the material 
world. It makes suns and stars our neighbors, builds 
splendid mechanism, makes heat and light serve us, and 
transmutes coal-beds into ' ' portable climate " and the force 



SCIENCE, EXTERNAL, AND DOGMATIC. 17 

that drives great engines. It broadens human thought, 
breaks up old dogmatism, and gives us The Reign of Law 
instead of the lawless miracles of the world's childhood. The 
high service of its great leaders should be justly appreci- 
ated, but it is inductive and external, and therefore material- 
istic in its tendency. It works from the surface by experi- 
ment, and knows no Soul of Things ; it knows man as a 
perishable body, not as an immortal spirit. This must and 
will be changed, for we can no more rest satisfied with 
incomplete scientific methods than with a poor and barren 
theology. 

Dealing with it as it is, we find one of its great inter- . 
preters, John Tyndall, saying that " matter contains within 
itself the promise and potency of all terrestrial life," or 
" of all life," as he originally said in his Belfast Address, 
the limiting word "terrestrial" having since been added. 
But here he halts and saj^s, "How it came to have this 
power is a question on which I never ventured an opinion ; " 
and in the same address he also says, " You cannot satisfy 
the human understanding in its demand for logical continu- 
ity between molecular processes and the phenomena of the 
human mind. This is a rock on which materialism must 
inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philoso- 
phy of the human mind." This is clear and emphatic, and 
shows how inconsequent and shallow this external philoso- 
phy is, when applied to mental problems. To solve the 
problems of the outward and material world it is just as 
incomplete. 

Let the men of this school speak for themselves. Atkin- 
son asks, "What are the instincts of animals, and the 
mind of man, but a result of chemical action and material 
processes?" Biichner says, "Matter is the origin of all 
that exists ; all natural and mental forces inhere in it." 
With a direct and commendable frankness Carl Vogt tells 
2 



18 MATERIALISM. — NEGATION". 

us, " The brain secretes thought, as the liver does bile." 
This honest statement brings us at once to the gist and 
logical conclusion of materialism, which makes mind a sec- 
ondary result of matter, and the visible universe, as James 
Martineau well says, " a self-acting dynamic engine," and 
not " the embodied thought of God." Of course, it makes 
human thought and intelligence and emotion but fine results 
of digestion. The clay creates and sustains the soul, and as 
the body grows cold and lifeless, that is the last of earth or 
heaven for us. Moral sentiment, intuition, power of will 
and design, are wrought out of the insensate dust ! The 
positive and shaping power of mind is lost sight of; the 
Supreme Intelligence is a myth of human childhood ; there 
is no spiritual genesis of things. Verily, matter not merety 
builds better than it knows, but, kuowing nothing, it evolves 
the spirit, ever striving to know all, and then nips it in the 
very bud of its being by the untimely frost of death ! 
We have had too much of Jehovah and too little of law, 
and now, as reaction and protest, we have law without God, 
and the life of man perishing with the earthly form. "We 
shall reach the golden mean, and find interior and invisible 
force ruling and shaping the outer shell of things that we 
see and feel, law everywhere, the Divine thought and will in 
all and ruling all, and the spirit of man surviving his dying 
body, which he shaped and used and then left behind. 

Huxley ma}' be Episcopalian or Presbyterian hy pro- 
fession, and ma} 7 be a constant church attendant, but his 
scientific ideas land him in materialism. He wrote in The 
Symposium : 

" In the interest of scientific clearness I object to say that I have a soul, 
when I mean all the while that my organism has certain mental functions, 
which, like the rest, are dependent on its molecular composition and come 
to an end when I die; and I object still more to affirm that I look to a future 
life, when all I mean is, that the influence of my doings and sayings will" 



SCIENCE, EXTERNAL AND DOGMATIC. 19 

be more or less felt by a number of people after tbe pbysical components of 
tbat organism are scattered to tbe four winds." 

Of course this logic leads to Atheism ; and a frank avowal 
that they are Atheists, bj - those who follow it to its con- 
clusion, would command the respect to which open and 
honest consistency is entitled. 

All scientists are not materialists, but the logic and ten- 
dency of our popular science is in that direction. Giving 
its interpreters due justice, it is well to see their faults and 
limitations, especially as the tide runs toward a blind wor- 
ship of their claims. There is a scientific dogmatism akin 
to that of old theology, — an assumption that nothing can 
be reliable or of any value without their indorsement, and 
that their methods are the finalities ; a contempt for all that 
is out of their range, quite like that of the pious bigot for 
what is not orthodox, and quite as absurd and injurious. 
We find skilled experts in some special department assum- 
ing to judge of matters of which they know little or nothing. 
An excellent geologist, for instance, may know little of 
experimental chemistry, and therefore his opinion or criti- 
cism of it can be of little value. No eminence in one 
realm of knowledge can make a man competent to judge or 
decide on another of which he has barely touched the bor- 
ders, or excuse or justify him in ridiculing the methods or 
conclusions of those who have explored regions unknown 
to him. This especially applies to the criticisms of some 
scientists on psycho-physiological investigations which they 
have not shared. When Tyndall, kingly in his realm, after 
but slight investigation, refuses with open contempt the 
courteous invitation of intelligent persons to share their 
studies and research, and talks of the " intellectual whore- 
dom " of spiritualism, he makes a pitiful descent from the 
manners of a gentleman and the true scientific spirit into 
vulgarity and intolerance. 



20 MATERIALISM. — NEGATION. 

In 1SG9, a, Committee of the London Dialectical Society, 
made up of persons of well-known and high standing, in- 
vited Huxley to investigate alleged spirit-phenomena with 
them. His answer was : 

" I take no interest in the subject. Tbe only case I have had the oppor- 
tunity to investigate was a gross imposture The only good I can see 

in a demonstration of the truth of spiritualism is to furnish an additional 
argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be 
made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a seance." 

Herbert Spencer refused to investigate spiritualism, as 
he had " settled the matter on a priori grounds." His the- 
ory must not 3 - ield to fact. All this reminds us of the poor 
Hindoo devotee who religiously held animal life sacred, and 
avoided animal food. When the microscope revealed to 
him the terrible fact that he swallowed scores of animated 
creatures with every drop of water, he would not yield to 
this evidence of his senses, and of course declined farther 
investigation, but angrily seized the microscope, crushed it 
with a great stone, and then had peace in the bliss of his 
old ignorance. 

The Popular Science Monthly sends out from its New 
York office, in its issue of December, 1879, an article on 
"Magic of the Middle Ages," which makes modern spirit- 
ualism ' ' the survival of the old practices of witchcraft, as a 
matter of curiosity and for the solemn amusement- of vacant 
minds." Amongthose "vacant- minds" are Wallace, Crookes, 
Victor Hugo, Zollner, Fichte, Butelof, Alice and Phebe 
Care3 r , Abraham Lincoln, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and many 
other well-known students and believers. Each and all of 
these would say, as some of them have to the public, that 
spirit-phenomena are not the weird miracles of witchcraft, 
but come in the realm and order of spiritual law, as natural 
facts. 

The old writer of ecclesiastical histoiy, Mosheim, tells 



SCIENCE, EXTERNAL AND DOGMATIC. 21 

us that, in the fourth centmy, pious men held it justifiable 
to misrepresent and deceive for the good of the church and 
the glory of God. It is hard to see an}* moral or mental 
difference between the deceptions of these old bigots, for 
the good of their church, and such gross and delusive mis- 
statements of the Popular Science Monthly, in the service 
of materialistic modern science. Verily, dogmatism is the 
same, in pagan, or pietist, or professor, in Hindostan or 
London, or in the Science Monthly in New York ; and this 
dogmatism of inductive and materialistic science is arrayed 
in powerful and bigoted opposition to a spiritual philosophy 
and to the research of the inner-life and spiritual relations 
of man. 

"We are learning that the title of scientist may be used 
to foster a foolish and exclusive pride. Science is exact 
and well-arranged knowledge, and the wool-grower, or the 
grower of corn or cattle, may be, and often is, as good a 
scientist as the titled professor — knowing fact and law in 
his realm as well as that professor does in some other. 

Men and women outgrow and repudiate the old theology ; 
the church has never taught them self-reverence or trust in 
their own souls, and so they drift off into skeptical doubt. 
The author of the Eclipse of Faith, (written in London 
in reply to Newman's Phases of Faith,) gives not only 
his own experience but that of many, in many lands to-day : 

"I have been rudely driven out of my old beliefs; my early Christian 
faith has given way to doubt; the little hut on the mountain-side, in which 
I had thought to dwell with pastoral simplicity, has been shattered by the 
tempest, and I turned out to the blast without a shelter. I have wandered 
long and far, but have not found rest. As I examine other theories, they 
seem to me pressed by at least equal difficulties with that I have abandoned. 
I cannot make myself contented, as others do, with believing nothing ; and 
yet I have nothing to believe. I have wrestled long and hard with my 
Titan foes, but not successfully. I have turned to every quarter of the uni- 
verse in vain When I gaze upon the bright page of the midnight 

heavens, those orbs gleam upon me with so cold a light and amidst so por- 



22 MATERIALISM. — NEGATION. 

tentous a silence, that I am, with Pascal, terrified at the spectacle of the 
infinite solitude." 

Such persons feel the wide sway of scientific thought, and 
find in it a fidelity and freedom beyond what the narrow 
sects they left had shown. 

The reaction from false ideas of God and man and im- 
mortality turns them toward the potency of matter, and in 
all sincerity they become materialists. All due honor to 
their moral courage and stuixty integrity, — a living rebuke 
to the cant of insincere professors of religion ! Their 
spiritual nature may not be cheered or inspired, the hunger 
of their hearts may not be satisfied, the horizon of life may 
not be warm and magnetic ; but one can live better, even 
in a thin and cold air than in the stifling breath of a dun- 
geon. The freed prisoner turns to pull down the walls of 
his Bastile before he builds a new home, and so materialism 
answers, for a time. 

As the same human nature is in us all, modified by birth 
and temperament and training, kindred hopes and imag- 
inings will spring up, and kindred ethics and morals be 
taught, irrespective of our theories. George Elliot has the 
fine spiritual insight of genius, yet hesitates to affirm the 
reality of a personal existence hereafter. George Holyoake 
and B. F. Underwood nobly aim to be, not merely icono- 
clastic but constructive, shaping plans for wiser practical 
conduct, yet they doubt the life beyond and a Supreme 
Mind. None can ignore the life within, and we are all 
related to the outer and material life, and learn of it by 
experience and experiment. Each man or woman repeats 
and represents the old Greek story of the demigod, of 
celestial and also of human parentage. He could dwell 
among the gods, 3-et he must touch the earth sometimes, to 
keep and renew his strength. Which way does our think- 
ing: tend ? Do we hold the husk as above the germ from 



SCIENCE, EXTERNAL AND DOGMATIC. 23 

Which it is shaped and outbuilt ? Do we make the outward 
shell dominant over the inner life ? Is not the more perfect 
method to know matter, and to know mind within, as shaper 
and builder, lifting all up to a finer development ? 

It has been well said that ' ' to doubt is the beginning of 
wisdom ; " and Tennj T son says finely : 

" There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half your creeds." 

This is true of a conscientious questioning of traditional 
limitations, yet an external and skeptical mood and habit 
are not healthy. Max Muller happily distinguished earnest 
doubt from this mood of shallow skepticism, when he said, 
in "Westminster Abbey : 

" There is an atheism which is unto death : there is another atheism which 
is the very life-blood of all true faith. It is the power of giving up what, 
in our best and most honest moments, we know to be no longer true ; it 
is the readiness to replace the less perfect, however dear and sacred it 
may have been to us, by the more perfect, however much it may be detested 
as yet by others. It is the true self-surrender, the true self-sacrifice, the 
greatest trust in truth, the truest faith. Without that atheism no new re- 
ligion, no reform, no resuscitation would ever be possible ; without that athe- 
ism no new life is possible for any one of us." 

These golden words show that we must search and ques- 
tion, that we may affirm and verify great truths of the soul. 
Thus shall we see and feel that the most interior and per- 
fect truth will cheer and inspire our whole being, and that 
materialism is the transient phase of skeptical reaction, 
touching the surface but not reaching the depths, and want- 
ing in exalting inspiration. Its theory of conscience makes 
that inward monitor a mere inheritance of certain molecular 
groupings and motions, rather than the divine gift of a 
voice within that stirs the pulses and lifts the whole being 
up to heroic heights of duty, and endeavor, and self-sacri- 
fice. Frederick Harrison, of England, treating of The Soul 
and Future Life, says : 



24 MATERIALISM. — NEGATION. 

"We certainly do earnestly reject that which is most fairly called materi- 
alism, and we will second every word of those who cry out that civilization 
is in danger if the workings of the human spirit are to become questions 
of physiology, and if death is the end of man, as it is the end of a sparrow. 
We not only assent to such protests, but we see very pressing need for 
making them. It is a coiTupting doctrine to open a brain, and tell us 
that devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that convolution 
of gray pulp, and that if man is the first of living animals, he passes away 
after a short space like the beasts that perish. And all doctrines, more or 
less, do tend to this, which offer physical theories as explaining moral phe- 
nomena, which deny man a spiritual in addition to a moral nature, which 
limit his moral life to the span of his bodily organism, and which have no 
place for ' religion ' in the proper sense of the word." 

We want a radicalism to uproot all falsehood, a conserva- 
tism to keep all truth. Dogmas and creeds, as authorities, 
must die ; but what of God, Duty, and Immortality? By 
what name better than religion can we call our reverent 
and intuitive aspiration for the divine and the infinite? 
How can we study Nature without recognizing Mind in it, — 
spirit ever positive and interior, matter negative and exter- 
nal, the inner- life moulding the outward form. Shall we 
ignore the testimony of both the soul and the senses touch- 
ing Immortality ? We turn to a Spiritual Philosophy for 
deeper wisdom, finer reverence, and more perfect culture. 
The path that leads to Materialism is dark and chilly ; we 
want light and warmth for clearer sight and a more vital 
and earnest life. 



A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND 

THE CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY.* 



" Before beginning, and without an end 
As space eternal, and as surety sure, 
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good ; 
Only its laws endure. 

This is its touch upon the blossomed rose, 
The fashion of its hand shaped lotus-leaves ; 

In dark soil and the silence of the seeds 
The robe of spring it weaves. 



The heart of it is Love, the end of it 

Is Peace and Consummation sweet. Obey ! " 

Buddhist, " The Light of Asia." — Edwin Arnold. 

" Eternal, self-existent soul ! 

From whom Life's issues take their start, 
Thou art the undivided whole, 

Of whom each creature forms a part. 



God of the granite and the rose ! 

Soul of the sparrow and the bee ! 
The mighty tide of Being flows 

Through countless channels, Lord, from Thee. 
It leaps to life in grass and flowers, 

Through every grade of being runs, 
Till, from Creation's radiant towers 

Its glory flames in stars and suns." — Doten. 

MATERIALISM and a Spiritual Philosophy are unlike 
and opposite. Materialism makes the crude and 
outward stuff we call matter dominant, has no spiritual 

*I use the term Spiritual Philosophy in a broad sense, to include the 
views and method of thought of those who start from the inner life, and so 

25 



26 A SUPBEME INDWELLING MIND THE 

genesis of things, but only blind force and law, ignores and 
holds superfluous a Central and Positive Mind, relies on 
our external senses as the sole source of knowledge, treats 
a life beyond the grave as an idle dream and religion as 
superstitious folly — both to vanish as rational knowledge 
enlightens the world. 

The central and inspiring idea of a Spiritual Philosophy 
is an indwelling and positive Mind : 

" Sustaining all — controlling, ruling o'er." 

It finds that interior and constant forces, governed by law 
and guided by that Mind, mould and shape, dissolve and 
shape again, the plastic and transient forms of matter, and 
so outwork an Infinite Design. Its natural religion is 
man's aspiration to bind himself to the Eternal Life, to obey 
the eternal law, to reach up toward the eternal wisdom and 
love, and make them manifest in his daily life. Its ethics 

recognize the supremacy of mind, an indwelling and guiding intelligence 
manifest in natural and spiritual law, and the future life of man. The facts 
of spirit-presence, and the study of psycho-physiological science, are inval- 
uable and greatly needed helps to a clear comprehension of this philosophy, 
yet there have been and are many, not technically spiritualists, — that is, 
■who do not accept or comprehend the facts of spirit-presence, — who are spirit- 
ual thinkers. Thoughtful persons in the orthodox churches, who are out- 
growing dogmas, and the advancing class of Liberal Christians, are of this 
increasing company. Outside of churches, outside of Christianity even, 
from Plato to our time, we find them. The line is clear and deep between 
their methods and conclusions and those of the materialist. The spiritualist 
and the materialist should have mutual respect for honest opinions, and for 
practical reforms all classes should unite, irrespective of other differences ; 
but any effort to join for earnest teaching of ideas unlike and opposite can 
bring no satisfactory results. In chemistry, salts and fluids and gases, when 
they meet, either fuse or hold apart, or fly off in destructive explosion; and 
the wise chemist knows what compounds it is well to bring together. There 
are spiritual as well as chemical affinities and repulsions. Spiritualism and 
materialism cannot fuse and mingle in the realm of thought, — they are 
opposite and irreconcilable; try the experiment and "the irrepressible con- 
flict " follows, in the nature of things. 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 27 

are based on the intellectual and spiritual constitution of 
man, and call for obedience to a law of right within. Sec- 
tarian dogmatists constantly assert that their shibboleths 
must be repeated or true religion will die. AVith the death 
of their dogmas will come a wiser reverence, a finer spirit- 
ual culture, a larger and nobler life on earth, more " pure 
and undefined religion." What they hold man's ruin will 
be his safety and abiding strength. Sectarian dogmas are 
transient and variable, but religion is a living and lasting 
power. 

On her way to the guillotine in Paris, where with a sweet 
bravery she triumphed over a cruel death, Madame Roland 
exclaimed, "O Libeily ! what deeds have been done in 
thy sacred name ! " None the less, but all the more, as she 
spoke these words in that supreme hour, did she believe in 
true Liberty, and trusted doubtless that her self-sacrifice 
might help its advent. So, as one looks back to the bloody 
cruelty and shameful persecution wrought in the name of 
religion, might the exclamation be, "O Religion! what 
deeds have been done in thy sacred name ! " Yet none the 
less ma}- we feel the reality, and look forward to the growth 
of true religion. All the more indeed, as we see how its 
divine elements have blessed the world and lifted up many 
lives, even amidst the perverted dogmatism and narrow 
bigotry of a darker Past. The Catholic Fenelon, the Quaker 
Penn, the infidel Robert Owen, the Presbyterian Howard, 
and the Unitarian Channing, all led lives of rare beauty 
and goodness. 

With our present education and prevalent views, people 
think of the creeds of the sects, the stated pra}"ers and 
services of the clerg}', the belief in the infallible Bible, at- 
tendance on so-called " divine service " in popular churches, 
and a profession of religion after these ideals, as necessary 
parts or synonyms of true religion ; and that whoever does 



28 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

not thus act and profess is in moral and spiritual danger — • 
is irreligious. All these are but transient and ever-changing 
forms aud opinions, a mingling of truth and error set 
up as authority, such as Christ, and Penn, and Paine, in 
their day protested against, and were under priestly ban 
for their protests. But the immortal and uplifting aspira- 
tion to be in divine unity with the ' ' Power that makes for 
Righteousness," lives and is to live, for it is of the soul, 
innate and permanent. Often it is plain that, in the deeper 
sense, the most religious men and women are outside the 
churches, and even repudiate and oppose what is called 
religion. William Howitt well says, "The natural condi- 
tion of humanity is alliance with the spiritual." Man's 
highest culture is the recognition of that alliance. 

The idea of an invisible and supreme intelligence would 
seem to be much more prevalent, of an earlier date, and 
more free from gross errors and absurdities, than writers 
of materialistic views have supposed, and the same is true 
of the belief in a future life. Dr. J. M. Peebles writes 
from India: " Ramasawing Naido, B. A., connected with 
the Madras High Court, assures us that in the ' Vedic era 
of literature the people were pastoral, worshiping one 
invisible and omnipresent God, and this one God was 
neither Brahma, Vishnu, nor Siva.' In the days of the 
Eg}^ptian Pharaohs, Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus taught, 
' This is He that is to be seen by the mind. This is He 
that hath no body, and that hath many bodies ; rather there 
is nothing of any body which is not He.' " 

In Macmillan's Magazine for July, Professor Max Midler 
discusses vigorously the question, "Is Fetichism a Primi- 
tive Form of Religion ? " Herbert Spencer and his disci- 
ples, who explain all religion as the evolution of fear, won- 
der, and awe excited \>y the sun and stars, by trees, ani- 
mals, and inanimate objects, will positively dissent from 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 29 

the conclusion the professor reaches. Yet the reasoning is 
valid, and shows the logical weakness of bringing a lofty 
sentiment from a low one with nothing but material ele- 
ments at work. Mr. Miiller clears away at the entrance 
of his theme the obloquy which has rested upon the word 
"fetich." Too much ignorance and depravity has been 
charged upon the negroes of Africa in comparison with the 
Christianized whites. By repeated illustration he estab- 
lishes two positions: "That there is hardly any religion 
without something which we ma}* call fetich-worship, and 
that there is no religion which consists entirely of fetich- 
ism." Fetich means, in common speech, some visible object 
of worship. Professor Miiller shows that the African ne- 
groes have the clear idea that their fetiches are only sym- 
bols, and that there is an invisible, omniscient, omnipotent 
spirit behind the representation. He says : 

" Though our knowledge of the religion of the negroes is still very 
imperfect, yet I believe I may say that, wherever there has been an 
opportunity of ascertaining the religious sentiments even of the lowest 
savage tribes, no tribe has ever been found without something beyond mere 

worship of so-called fetiches What I maintain is, that fetichism was 

a corruption of religion ; that the negro is capable of higher religious ideas 
than the worship of stocks and stones ; and that the same people who be- 
lieved in fetiches cherished at the same time very pure, very exalted, very 

true sentiments of the Deity The more I study heathen religions, 

the more I feel convinced that, if we want to form a true judgment of their 
purpose, we must measure them as we measure the Alps, by the highest 
point which they have reached." 

Many African tribes believe in a Supreme Being, though 
in several cases his name is the same word as that used for 
" sky," or " clouds." In such cases the view can be well 
supported that the idea was transferred from the Supreme 
Being to the greatest boons which he gives to his children 
in a thirsty land. It is not certain that the word was first 
used to mean " sk} r ," or " clouds." On the Gold Coast the 
negroes believe in spirits, or " wongs," which inhabit the 



30 A SUPEEME INDWELLING MIND THE 

man}' objects which are worshiped as fetiches. After a 
review of many varying forms of fetich-worship, the writer 
asks : 

" Is there the slightest evidence to show that there ever was a time when 
these negroes were fetich-worshipers only and nothing else ? Docs not all 
our evidence point rather in the opposite direction, viz., that fetichism was 
a parasitical development, intelligible with certain antecedents, but never 
as an original impulse of the human heart ? " 

It is of moment in the discussion to see how pertinently 
Professor Miiller puts upon ancient and modern civilization 
the charge of fetich- worship ; and we must plead guilty if 
reverence for an object and religious care for the emblems 
of the unseen is to be labeled and advertised as super- 
ficially as the manifestation of like sentiments by the blacks 
of Africa. Pictures, altars, and images may be fetiches as 
truly as trees, snakes, and stones. The necessity of the 
second commandment, "Thou shalt not make to thyself 
any graven image," and so on, is seen in this warning gen- 
eralization of the learned professor : 

" One of the lessons which the history of religions certainly teaches is 
this : that the curse pronounced against those who would change the invisi- 
ble into the visible, the spiritual into the material, the divine into the human, 
the infinite into the finite, has come true in every nation on earth. We may 
consider ourselves safe against the fetich-worship of the poor negroes ; but 
there are few of us, if any, who have not their own fetiches, or their own 
idols, whether in their churches or in their hearts." 

The end of the study of fetichism in its development in 
Africa is thus clearly set forth : 

"Fetichism, then, far from being, as we are told by almost every writer 
on the history of religions, a primitive form of faith, is, on the contrary, so 
far as facts enable us to judge, a secondary or tertiary formation, nay, a 
decided corruption of an earlier and simpler religion. If we want to find 
the true springs of religious ideas, we must mount higher. Stocks and 
stones were not the first to reveal the infinite before the wondering eyes of 
men." 

To leave no stronghold of the enemy untaken behind 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 81 

him, the professor, as he advances into the opposing the- 
ories, meets the argument that at greater or less antiquity 
the growth of belief in supernatural power was evolved 
from physical objects. His position is, that the evolution 
theory utterly fails to account for the predicate "God," 
which the savage puts into the sun, stars, or other things. 
From the ideas furnished by the five senses no concept 
"God" could ever arise. "Whence, then, comes the ten- 
dency to predicate divinity of natural objects of unusual 
power ? The discussion is thorough and logical. It reveals 
again the ever-recurring truth that man, with only his 
senses for aid, could never have reached the moral con- 
ceptions and development he now has. Higher than the 
visible is the invisible, which both the Christian and heathen, 
philosopher and savage, agree in calling " God." 

A writer, quoted with approval and indorsement by 
Mtiller, says : 

" The statement that there are nations and tribes which possess no re- 
ligion, rests either on inaccurate observations or on a confusion of ideas. 
No tribe or nation has jet been met with destitute of belief in any higher 
beings, and travelers who asserted their existence have been afterwards re- 
futed by facts. It is legitimate, therefore, to call religion, in its most general 
sense, an universal phenomenon of humanity." 

The missionary Cruikshank thinks the Gold Coast negroes 
have a very old belief in God, " He who made us," mingled 
with fetich- worship. Max Mtiller traces back the Greek 
word Zeus to the old Sanscrit Dyaus, — the sk}-, brightness, 
the illuminator, — and so finds the gleaming dawn of the 
Deific idea far back in old Vedic days. 

The Persian Hafiz said, " Remember Him who has seen 
numberless Mahomets, Vishnus, and Sivas come and go, 
and who is not found by him who turns away from the 
poor." Samuel Johnson tells us that " the Hindoo thinker 
found Deity most near him, not as visible shape, but as 



32 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

Word, the symbol of pure thought in his own marvelous 
Sanscrit," oldest probably of all known languages. He 
tells us that their Vedic hymns refer back to a still remoter 
antiquity with its faith in the Divine. The Hindoo Manu 
said, " O friend of virtue, that Supreme Being which thou 
believest one with thyself resides perpetually in thy bosom, 
and is an all-knowing inspector of thy virtue or thy crime." 
Nirkuta, an ancient sage of the same race, declared that, 
" Owing to the greatness of the Deity, the One soul is 
lauded in many ways. The gods are members of the One 
Soul." 

Reary Chanel Mittra, a Calcutta merchant, a scholar and 
a spiritualist, writing on The Psjxhology of the Aryas, 
quotes from the Bhagavat Gita on the destiny of departed 
saints : ' ' They proceed unbewildered to that imperishable 
place which is not illumined by the sun or moon, to that 
primeval Spirit whence the spirit of life for ever flows." 
He quotes a Buddhist prayer to the " heart and soul of the 
universe," and a hymn sung on hearing the convent bell : 

" Produce in all a perfect rest and quiet from eveiy care, 
And guide each living soul to lose itself in Mind Supi - eme." 

As the tide of higher thought sets that way, we shall find 
that man, in all ages and regions, has a consciousness of 
divine relations which lead him toward the Supreme and 
Infinite Being. 

The student in science will find too that all efforts to 
interpret the facts of Nature without the theory of a cen- 
tral and ruling mind are painfully inadequate. 

The problem and demand of to-day is to put in place of 
Materialism : 

First. An idea of Deity free from superstition or slavish 
fear, and so recognize Mind as ruling Matter, give scope 
for rational and natural reverence, and find a firm and clear 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 38 

foundation for morals and ethics in the attributes of that 
Being — the Soul and Centre of things, with its moral laws 
pervading all time and reaching all souls more and more, — ■ 
laws in us, the very existence of which proves that of the 
Central Mind from whence they sprang. 

Second. An idea of religion free from dogmatism and 
without supernatural miracles, and that shall enlarge, uplift, 
and fraternize, and not enslave and alienate, men and 
peoples. 

Third. An assurance of immortality that shall give light 
and help and inspiration to daily life, and show us how 
trial and discipline work upward toward good, how sin 
brings suffering, yet good at last conquers evil, and how 
justice can be satisfied and hope made rational by the com- 
pensations of the Life Beyond. 

The materialist says, ' ' I cannot comprehend infinite 
mind, and therefore will not trouble myself about it." Can 
he comprehend infinite matter? or eternal law and force? 
or ether filling all space from all time ? Yet these last he 
assumes must be. Matter he knows by his senses, law and 
force b} r their effects ; and if there were no ether, he says 
light and heat could not be, and therefore this invisible and 
all-pervading substance must permeate all space. He spends 
years in the study of matter and law and force, is con- 
stantly troubling himself about them, and gets well paid 
for his trouble. If he would go back to the indwelling 
Mind, his trouble would be joy and his compensation a 
deeper insight, a broader range, a more perfect knowledge 
of Nature and of man. 

" To this complexion it must come at last," 

or inductive and materialistic science will be savage jargon 
and the babble of childhood in the light of coming spiritual 
ideas and systems of thought and research. There is in- 
3 



34 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

deed no true scientific method which ignores positive and 
creative mind and design. All else is fragmentary. Has 
crude matter evolved intelligent moral power and purpose? 
Has it developed the beauty of love and emotion and aspira- 
tion? Is the clay the maker of the sky? Will clod and 
rock stand when the heavens fall? Sex is even more of 
soul than person. When and how came the differentiation 
into male and female? It is learned folly. 

How majestic and largely ordered this development from 
nebulae to suns and stars ! How wonderful the irresistible 
upward tendency of our earth, from the ages when no life 
stirred on its slimy wastes and no animal breathed its fetid 
air to the beauty and the teeming life of to-da}- ! No 
grandest human plan or design equals this divine pro- 
cedure. The progress of man is no mere theory, but a 
scientific and historic fact. From the savage of the stone 
age dwelling in his cave and smiting wild beasts, or savage 
foes as wild, with his club, to the builder of palace-homes 
and steamships and railroads ; from the swift-footed mes- 
senger sent over the heather-clad hills b} T Roderick Dim 
to bear the flaming cross that called the Highland clans ta 
battle, to the telegram flashing its message farther and 
faster than the lightning, and the spiritual telegram from 
the life beyond, is the same story, — a fact more marvelous 
than any fiction. 

From the rude policy of savage tribes to the complex 
legislation of modern empires, and the opening future of 
great republics, with their ideal of " a government of the 
people, for the people, and by the people," recognizing the 
freedom and equality of man and woman, is a long upward 
reach. 

In religious progress it is the same. In all ages great 
seers and thinkers have spoken kindred words, revealing 
thus the inner and spiritual fraternity of man ; but the 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 35 

ideas which these gifted few could know and teach, reach 
the peoples more and more, and are felt and understood by 
growing numbers. From a jealous Jehovah, the fall of 
man, total depravity, and a hell of endless torture and 
despair, to Quakerism, liberal Congregationalism, Uni- 
versalism and Unitarianism, and to Free Religion and 
Spiritualism, is a long road upward toward light, and to- 
ward the truth that shall make all free. This upward path 
does not lead to the gospel of the clod as king and the soul 
as subject and dependant, living to-day but to die at its 
master's mandate to-morrow. The growth of man, like all 
growth, is from within, and so immortality, and duty, and 
Deity live. 

Although not always manifest at first, yet at last we come 
to see that every step in reform helps to the supremacy of a 
spiritual philosophy. This has been called "woman's era." 
Her higher education, her equality before law and gospel, 
in marriage and wherever she goes, the growing reverence 
for her sacred maternal office, will all give us a new wealth 
of intuition, a greater spiritual power in the world's thought ; 
for the wealth of womanhood is in the interior life of 
woman. 

Professor Newcomb saj^s, " Science deals with the laws 
and properties of matter." With a deeper insight Buckle 
writes, "We know little of the laws of matter, bemuse we 
know little of the laws of mind" When we come to see 
that matter is always shaped and controlled by mind, and 
that the body of man is lighted up and vivified by the con- 
scious spirit within, we shall make better and truer progress. 

This phase of scientific thought which stops at the " plrysi- 
cal basis of life," and so holds mind and thought as deriva- 
tive from matter, is not to bear lasting sway. Its reign is 
already disputed. In August, 1878, the British Scientific 
Association held its annual meeting at Glasgow, where its 



36 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

members listened to an address from its President elect, 
Dr. G. J. Allman, former Regius-Professor of Natural His- 
tory in Edinburgh. He took ground that the physical basis 
is not also the psychical or spiritual basis of life, and criti- 
cised Huxley in friendly frankness. A few sentences of 
his address will show the tendency of its thought : 

" When, however, we say that life is a property of protoplasm, we assert 
as much as we are justified in doing-. Here we stand upon the boundary 
between life in its proper conception, as a group of phenomena having irri- 
tability as their common bond, and that other and higher group of phenom- 
ena which we designate as consciousness or thought, and which, however 
intimately connected with those of life, are yet essentially distinct from 

them When a thought passes through the mind it is associated, as 

we now have abundant reason for believing, with some change in the pro- 
toplasm of the cerebral cells. Are we, therefore, justified in regarding 
thought as a property of the protoplasm of these cells, in the sense in which 
we regard muscular contraction as a property of the protoplasm of muscle ? 
Or is it really a property residing in something far different, but which 

may yet need for its manifestation the activity of cerebral protoplasm 

Tbe chasm between unconscious life and thought is deep and impassable, 
and no transitional phenomena can be found by which as by a bridge we may 

span it over That consciousness is never manifested except in the 

presence of cerebral matter, or of something like it, there cannot be a ques- 
tion ; but this is a very different thing from its being a property of such 
matter in the sense in which polarity is a property of the magnet, or irri- 
tability of protoplasm Whatever may be that mysterious bond which 

connects organizations with psychical endowments, the one grand fact — a 
fact of inestimable importance — stands out clear and free from all obscurity 
and doubt, that from the first dawn of intelligence there is in every advance 
of organization a corresponding advance in mind. Mind as well as body is 
thus traveling onwards through higher and still higher phases ; the great 
law of evolution is shaping the destiny of our race ; and though now we 
may at most but indicate some weak point in the generalization which would 
refer consciousness as well as life to a common material source, who can 
say that in the far-off future there may not yet be evolved other and 
higher faculties from which light may stream in upon the darkness, and 
reveal to man the great mystery of thought ? " 

The light streaming in on the darkness, of which he speaks 
in the closing sentence, is nearer than he thinks. In the 
facts of spiritualism and the philosophy toward which they 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 37 

point, he and his eminent associates will find its dawn. In 
due time the} 7 will examine them. 

Professor J. D. Dana, of Yale College, writes in his New 
Haven study on evolution, recognizing it as the process of 
a divine mind : 

"The theories of evolution which make progress mere transformism, as 
it has been designated, or a direct result of the pulling, shaping, or trans- 
forming action of environments, I regard as based on a superficial view of 
nature. I hold that in evolution there was truly an evolving ; that beneath 
are molecular and physiological laws whose action external conditions or 
the environments were able to modify, but not to control. And I may say 
further, thai it is my confiding belief that al law is law by divine appoint- 
ment, for a divine purpose, and that all force is the ever-active divine 
will." 

The separation and divorce of science and religion 
should come to an end. If we speak of Deity or immor- 
tality, the inductive scientist sa3 T s, " I neither affirm nor 
deny ; " yet all the while his spirit and methods are full 
of denial. How is it possible to be non-committal on 
such topics ? They are at the very source and foundation 
of all inquiry, giving cast and method not only to religious, 
but to scientific thought and research. It is true that in 
the realm of ethics and morals there may be a partial 
division of labor ; these may be more especially the prov- 
ince of the religious teacher, while the phenomena and 
laws of nature and of life ma}' be studied by the natural 
scientist and the biologist, but neither can afford to ignore 
or keep apart from the other. Surely the scientist must 
aim to obey what is right and true, and must enlighten his 
conscience to that high end ; and the religious teacher must 
enrich and enlarge his thoughts \>y the grand facts and 
laws of nature. Their fields of effort infringe on each other, 
to their mutual benefit. If mind rules matter, or if God 
exists, the scientist must know that great central truth, 
and make it the soul of his philosophy, or make strange 



38 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

blunders. If man is immortal, the scientist must know it, 
or grope in the dark when he tries to study his nature and 
relations. Neither science nor religion can ignore such mat- 
ters, for they reach over and interpenetrate the whole field 
of both. 

In justice to the scientist it should be said that theolo- 
gians have kept their dogmas in the front, and it is no mar- 
vel that the large-minded student of nature should shrink, 
with pitying dislike or open contempt, from election and 
reprobation, from all manner of devils and hells and blood} 7 
atonements, and escape into the free air and to his own 
nobler ideals. But as this impious dogmatism dies, a new 
order comes, and the scientist and the teacher of natural 
religion and spiritual culture can and must be mutual help- 
meets. The great truths at the root of science and religion 
are the same, and as the students in both learn this, the 
dogmatism of theology and the negations of materialism 
will fade away. The conflict ever has been between science 
and a theological creed- worship, which calls itself religion. 
Between natural religion and true science there can be no 
conflict. 

F. W. Newman, in the London Contemporary Review, in 
reply to Pbysicus, a materialistic scientist, says : 

"He is simply false in fact when he says (indeed often repeats) that 
modern science has made the hypothesis of a divine power superfluous. 
.... He becomes ludicrously false when he says that the doctrine of Natu- 
ral Selection completes the whole chain of causes, and explains the evolution 
of the present world out of the chaos of different nebula. Forsooth the 
sexes rose out of one by natural selection ! What drivel may not be blurted 
out under the pompous pretext of modern science ! . . . . Nothing is less 
intelligent than the attempt of Herbert Spencer and others to cast scorn on 
Theism as a development of Fetichism. It is a confirmation to the Theist, 
a pride not a shame, that mankind, born in its lowest state, has always dis- 
covered that Superior Mind acts in the Universe. Pritchard (a celebrated 
anthropologist) lays down reverence for the Unseen Powers as one criterion 
of the species." 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 39 

Physicus, carrying out his materialistic logic with honest 
frankness, had said : 

" There can be no longer any greater doubt that the existence of God is 
•wholly unnecessary to explain any of the phenomena of the Universe, than 
there is that if I let go of my pen it will fall to the table." 

I must make earnest protest against the superficial and 
external method and spirit of thinking, which holds nothing 
proved save outward things, tangible to the senses. It is 
the method of materialism, indorsed by what some men 
call science. 

Man is the highest being on earth, his soul the motive 
and guiding power of his wondrous physical body. What 
that soul asserts and hopes for, in all lands and ages, has 
thereby millions of confirmations, — more than all tests of 
crucible or microscope have given of anything in the outer 
world. For a few centuries the magnetic needle has turned 
to the pole, but for thousands of years countless millions of 
souls have turned to the Supreme Mind. By a few recent 
experiments, we have gone back to what scientists con- 
sider the physical basis of life, but from the earliest historic 
days millions have intuitively gone back to the spiritual 
basis of life, and looked forward to the life beyond. Per- 
haps the earliest recorded prayer is that in the Vedas, cen- 
turies before the Mosaic Genesis was written, in which the 
Hindoo saint exclaims : 

"Come, oh, Great Father! along with the spirits of our fathers." 

The soul's testimony is oldest, deepest, and most enduring, 
and it grows clearer as man reaches a higher interior 
development. The old Hindoo, the Catholic Fenelon, the 
Quaker George Fox, the Methodist Wesley,- and the spirit- 
ual teacher of to-day, but speak the thought of millions 
when they tell of Deity and immortality. Voltaire and 
Thomas Paine, infidels as they were called, have left us 



40 A SUPREME INDWELLING MUSTD THE 

their words of beauty and power on the existence of the 
Supreme Being. The soul saj-s, "God is," and star and 
sky, mountain and rose, reveal Him. The soul says, "I 
shall not die ; " and the facts of spirit-presence in all ages 
confirm its testimony. The outward is but test and sign 
of that which is within, — invisible, intangible, known only 
by its results and effects, as we know the spirit in man by 
the glance of the eye or the music of the voice, and his 
mental power by pyramid and palace, by railroad and 
steamship, in constructing which the skilled hand is but 
the tool of the guiding mind. Vast spaces lie beyond the 
reach of the telescope ; no chemist can test, and no eye 
can see the inner-life of man. Around and within us is 
this great super-sensuous region. The realm of the spirit 
is wider than that of the senses. The truths of the soul 
are primal and creative ; to give these truths due weight, 
and to pay heed to their outward signs in the testimony of 
the senses, is the need of our day. 

As Bartol, the wise Boston preacher, well puts the case : 
"The atheist says, 'No God distinct from Nature.' I 
answer, 'No Nature distinct from God.'" As soul itdes 
body, so mind rules matter. This is a universal law < rea- 
tive of all phenomena. 

Deity, immortality, and religion are not superstitious fan- 
cies of the childhood of man, to disappear with his grc wth. 
It has been well said : ' ' Take any one of what are c ailed 
popular superstitions, and on looking at it thoroughly, we 
shall be sure to discover in it a firm underlying stratum of 
truth. There may be more than we suspected of folly and 
fancy ; but when these are stripped off, there remains quite 
enough of that stiff, unyielding material which belongs not 
to persons or periods, but is common to all ages, to puzzle 
the learned, and silence the scoffer." Mingled with the 
folly and superstition of undeveloped man, as we see them 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 41 

in creed and ceremonial, is this "unyielding material," — ■ 
these great truths of Nature and of the soul, which will 
grow clear and inspiring with the unfolding progress and 
the rational freedom of humanity. 

All growth is from within, as the tree outbuilds its yearly 
layer around its trunk. The visible germ is interior, yet 
the shaping potency in that germ none can see. This great 
globe, and what of suns and stars we can reach, all demon- 
strate interaction, interdependence, and unity impossible 
without design, and so we reach back to mind. In atom 
or sea-shell, in flower or man, in mountain or ocean or 
blazing star it is the same. Where the body is, there is the 
soul; where matter is, there is mind, — "God in all and 
through all and over all forever." We are told of suffering 
and sin as inconsistent with Divine power and goodness, 
which should not permit them ; but how transient is all 
that we see in the great spaces of eternity ! Even in this 
life the good is far greater than the perversion and imper- 
fection that we call evil. How sweet the sanctity that 
comes from the chastenings of sorrow or pain. Our dis- 
ciplines and experiences are the straying and stumbling 
that lead us, at last, to the upward path. Without imper- 
fection and discipline no growth is possible, and this growth 
is the abiding j'03 7 and inspiration of our existence. Look 
to the higher stages of the eternal life, and we see all this, 
and more. The broader our view, the larger and deeper 
our spiritual experience, the more life comes to us in this 
light, and so our sense of justice is satisfied. At best, we 
are 

"But children crying in the night," 

and to us, as to the fretful child, will come the day. 
As S. J. Finne}^ states the matter: 

" How is religion possible to man ? On the ground of three great ideas. 
First, an infinite spiritual reason and causation; second, a representative 



42 A SUPEEME INDWELLING MIND THE 

divine or spiritual nature in man ; third, the inspiration of the second by the 
first. 

"The absence of either of these great fundamental conditions renders 
religion impossible to man. If the Deity be Zero, there can be no divine 
soul in man, no inspiration from God. If there be a soul in man, and no 
infinite soul, there can be no inspiration, no progress, no divine ideals of 
perfection to charm on to the spiritual levels. And if there be a God and a 
soul in man, and no vital connection between them, then there can be no 
progress toward perfection, no transcendent ideas, nor march of man for the 
Morning Land, the New Atlantis. 

" Religion as a historic fact, then, involves these three great central ideas : 
1st, God, the all in all ; 2d, a divine correlative element in man ; and, 3d, 
a vital connection between God and man. 

" Our souls are as adequate to find God, as are our senses to find the sun ; 
and precisely in the same manner — by analysis. We climb up the sun- 
beams to the solar center; we climb up on soul-beams to the spiritual center. 
As rocks and trees are petrified sunbeams, so souls are petrified beams of 
God, and the latter is in as vital sympathy with its source, as is the other. 

" Inspiration is spiritual power pouring directly into us from the fountain- 
heads of creation, the reaction of which raises us up to the divine levels." 

Dogmatic Theology separates science and religion ; a 
Spiritual Philosophy enlarges and perfects science, and 
unites the two. Eeligion is aspiration, the soul reaching 
out and up toward the Infinite Love and Wisdom to which 
it is akin, and of which it is a part ; science surveys and 
smooths the upward path and maps out the way, so that 
we may know it and walk in it. 

Thomas Carlyle says : 

"According to Fichte, there is a Divine Idea pervading the visible 
universe, which visible universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible 
manifestation, having, in itself, no meaning, or even true existence inde- 
pendent of it. To the mass of men this Divine Idea is hidden ; yet to dis- 
cern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine vir- 
tue, knowledge, freedom, and the end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in 
every age." 

It is the old question — ■ a living God or matter as king, 
the immortal spirit or the dying body as the real man — 
forced on us with desperate effort by dogmatic materialistic 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 43 

scientists, who repudiate human testimony, shut their eyes 
against facts, and determine to annihilate all belief of any- 
thing beyond matter and force. Let it be pressed. George 
Fox said, " Truth, above all things, beareth away the vic- 
tory." 

Bartol asks, "Without the Infinite Spirit, how are our 
finite spirits possible?" James Martineau, of London, one 
of the ablest Unitarian clergymen in England, in a mas- 
terly criticism of Tyndall's " Potency of Matter," says : 

" The universe, which includes and folds us around is the life-dwelling of 
an Eternal Mind ; the world of our abode is the scene of a Moral Govern- 
ment, incipient but not yet complete ; the upper zones of human affection, 
above the clouds of self and passion, take us into the sphere of a Divine 
Communion." 

His statement is admirable, so far as it goes. I will 
venture to add to it. Man is a microcosm ; rock, earth, 
and all flora and fauna reach up into his corporeal frame ; 
all subtile forces that hold and sway suns and stars pulse 
through him ; all ideas of freedom, justice, immortality, 
and the great truths that ever uplift and save this world of 
man, and all worlds of men and angels, are in and of 
his spiritual being. 

" From the earth-poles to the Line, 
All between that works and grows, 
Everything is kin of mine." 

So made up and related, the spirit of man must have 
great wealth of innate and intuitive knowledge, and wide 
and wondrous power of discovery. 

The upper zones of human thought and affection take us 
into the sphere of a spirit communion with our friends in a 
higher realm of the eternal life. The fact of clairvoyance, 
and of spirit-presence and manifestation, demonstrate the 
wide reach and subtile swa}' of man's interior powers and 
the supremacy of the spirit, outlasting the earthly form. 



44 A SUPREME INDWELLING MEND THE 

A Spiritual Philosophy makes Mind, active in will and 
instinct with intelligent and ever-unfolding design, the 
cause of all phenomena, the soul of all life from mollusk 
up to man ; Materialism refuses to recognize Mind, but 
starts with matter and stops with law and force, — unintel- 
ligent powers, out of which, in some blind and mysterious 
way, intelligence is evolved. It deals largely in negation 
and denial, and its pride is to accept only what is tangible 
to our outward senses. I heard, not long ago, a speaker 
triumphantly say to an audience that he did not believe in 
God, because he had never seen him. A little thought 
might moderate such shallow assurance, and lead one to 
see that causes are always invisible ; it is only the effects 
that we see. 

Du Bois Raymond, addressing a great Congress of Nat- 
uralists at Leipsic, in 1872, said: 

" What conceivable connection exists between definite movements of 
definite atoms of my brain on the one band, and on the other hand such 
primordial and indefinable facts as these : I feel pain or pleasure ; I experi- 
ence a sweet taste, or smell a rose, or hear an organ, or see something- red ? 
It is absolutely and forever inconceivable that a number of carbon, hydro- 
gen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms should be otherwise than indifferent as to 
their own position and motion, past, present, or future. It is utterly incon- 
ceivable how consciousness should result from their joint action." 

Truly it is " utterly inconceivable," unless we know that 
God is, — that an Infinite and Positive Mind moves and 
guides all, and mounts up to consciousness in the wondrous 
being of man. 

Tyndall says : 

" I do not think the materialist is entitled to say that his molecular group- 
ings and motions explain everything. In reality they explain nothing. The 
utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of phenomena of 
whose real bond of union he is in absolute ignorance. The problem of the 

connection of body and soul is as insoluble as in pre-scientific ages 

If you ask him whence this ' Matter,' who or what divided it into molecules, 
or impressed upon them this necessity of running into organic forms, he has 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 45 

no answer. Science is mute in reply to these questions. But if the materi- 
alist is confounded aud science dumb, who else is prepared with a solu- 
tion ? To whom has this arm of the Lord been revealed ? Let us lower 
our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and 
all." 

In the last year, in The Nineteenth Century, he said no 
scientist can explain how the brain acts, or devise sensation 
and thought from physical interaction of its molecules. 
He tells the materialist : 

"The facts you consider so simple are as difficult, I tell you, to be seized 
mentally as the idea of the soul. If you abandon the interpretation of 
grosser minds, who image the soul as a Psyche which could be thrown out 
of a window, or an entity which is usually occupied, we do not know how, 
among the molecules of the brain, but which in the face of a bullet, or the 
blow of a club, can fly away into space, — if abandoning this heathen notion 
you approach humbly the subject, in the only way in which approach is pos- 
sible, if you consent to make your soul a poetic rendering of the phenomena; 
which, as I have taken more pains than anybody else to show you, repels 
the yoke of the physical will, then I would not object to this exercise of 
ideality ; but when you stand on cold bald materialism as the creation and 
creator of all, I object." 

A study of psycho-physiological science — of magnet- 
ism, clairvoyance, and spirit-manifestation — would reveal 
to this gifted teacher the dual being of man, the reality of 
his spiritual body and the soul within it, both of which, 
survive "the face of a bullet or the blow of a club," and 
he would be saved the poor necessity of making the " soul 
a poetic rendering of the phenomena " of mind. All this 
he chooses to ignore, and so vacillates between his inductive 
science which leads to materialism and his intuitions which 
turn him away from it. In his Belfast Address he said : 

"Religion, though valuable in itself, is only man's speculative creation. 
It is good for man to frame for himself a theology, if only to keep him 
quiet." 

Then he declares that Address was misapprehended, and 
says : 



46 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

" I have noticed, during years of self-observation, that it is not in hours 
of clearness and vigor that this doctrine (i. e. atheism) commends itself to 
my mind; that in the presence of stronger and healthier thoughts it ever 
dissolves and disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which we 
dwell, and of which we form a part." 

It is a pity that his " hours of clearness and vigor," or 
of the preponderance of his interior and spiritual faculties, 
are not frequent enough to master his life, and lift his 
thought out of the materialism which swaj'S and yet does 
not satisfy him. Such men are paying the painful penalty 
of uncertainty and vacillation which comes of ignoring the 
spiritual science of our da}", and the voice within. His 
words reveal a fit modesty and humility in the presence of 
these great questions, for at best we can see and know but 
partially, but they reveal, too, the utter incompetence of 
materialism, which explains nothing. Accept the idea of 
mind, working in and through all things, and man and 
nature stand in a clearer light, all is more reasonable and 
consistent, the idea helps to solve the facts, and we still 
have much to learn, and so the joy of gaining knowledge 
is ever ours. 

The materialist may say, "It is unscientific to accept 
theories ; only solid facts learned by experiment will an- 
swer." This is not so ; some of the grandest demonstra- 
tions of science start with a theory and are impossible 
otherwise. Mathematics is based on axioms, held as self- 
evident. The whole splendid range of experiment and dis- 
covery by which light and heat are proved to be modes of 
motion, rests on the assumption of an invisible and all-per- 
vading ether — "The bold theory," as Tyndall calls it, 
" according to which all-space is filled with an elastic sub- 
stance capable of transmitting the motions of light and 
heat." Herbert Spencer saj's that "physicists in their 
investigations assume that the units of matter act upon 
each other according to the same law, — an assumption 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 47 

■which indeed -tt^ are obliged to make, since the law is not 
simply an empirical one, but one deducible mathematically 
from the relations of space, one of which the negation is 
inconceivable." The eternity of matter and law and force 
is assumed too, for the negation of that assumption would 
be inconceivable to a scientist. 

The method by which units of matter act on each other 
rests on theory. An invisible and all-pervading ether can be 
assumed, because proof of certain scientific theories is im- 
possible "without such assumption, and the materialist com- 
placently accepts all this ; but speak of an all-pervading 
Mind, of which "the negation is inconceivable" to a spir- 
itual thinker, and he smiles, or sneers, and talks of childish 
folly! 

The scientific theories of evolution and natural selection 
are not proved by an unbroken chain of facts. There are 
many missing links in the chain, and wide gaps in the series 
of evidence ; ages between the fossils and strata that tell 
fragments of the wondrous story. Wallace and Darwin 
admit this, with the modesty of true greatness, and all 
small materialistic dogmatists would do well to imitate their 
example. These great theories have but a large probabiltty, 
going with their reasonableness, as best accounting for 
known facts in Nature, and this probability is fairly held as 
a weight} 7 argument and a stimulus to investigation. These 
theories do not touch the question of an indwelling and 
ruling Mind, which may act better through evolution than 
by special and arbitrary creation. The continuous series 
of proofs of clairvoyance and spirit-presence is more com- 
plete than that on which these scientific conclusions are 
based. 

Here are suns and stars, held in place or moving in such 
perfect harmony that if we could hear their motion it would 
be the music of the spheres. Here are laws of due dis- 



48 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

tance and proportion so perfect that Plato well said, " God 
geometrizes." All about us is the grandeur and beauty of 
the globe we live on, ripening up to finer uses through the 
ages ; life, from lowest to highest, linked together by won- 
drous similitudes, reaching toward finer types by an all- 
pervading upward tendency ; and man last and highest, his 
thought widening with the process of the suns ; evil tran- 
sient, and good permanent ; suffering but a discipline, and 
the joys of existence overcoming its sorrows, here and 
hereafter. 

So far as we can see is evident a unity of design and 
purpose impossible without One Supreme Intelligence and 
Will, which materialism ignores, and yet is proud of its 
wisdom ! A diviner wisdom was that of Emerson when he 
said : 

" Ever fresh, the broad creation, 
A Divine improvisation, 
Erom the heart of God proceeds ; 
A single will, a million deeds." 

Even Herbert Spencer, in an hour when his inmost spirit 
utters itself, contradicts his inductive and external philoso- 
phy, and says : 

" The religion of humanity does not satisfy the soul. The religion of 
humanity can never exclude the sentiment awakened by that which is behind 
humanity and behind all other things, — a power of which humanity is but 
a small and fugitive product." 

We do not see or know force or law, save by their results 
and effects, but the materialist believes in them and main- 
tains that they must be. What are they but the. working 
processes of mind? Yet that informing mind he stoutly 
denies ! Nowhere is matter possible without mind, or mind 
without matter ; not as separate or conflicting entities, but 
as inseparable elements in the great Cosmos. Everywhere 
it is soul and body, but mind is ever the potency in matter, 
dominates it, works from within outward, as the positive 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 49 

and creative power, spirit ever building and shaping form 
in a world as in man, and the One Mind in and through all. 
Alexander Bain, of Scotland, treating of mind and body, 
sa} T s, " The one substance with two sets of properties, two 
sides, the pLrysical and the mental, — a double-faced unity, 
— would appear to comply with all the exigences of the 
case." 

I quote the fit language of an unknown and able writer, 
the author and compiler of an admirable series of articles 
on "Devotional Spiritualism," in the Religio-Pliilosopliical 
Journal : 

"All power, in its last analysis, is will-power. Everywhere do we see 
matter as ruled by its lord and master, Mind ; how then can it be the pro- 
genitor of mind ? Can the transient produce the permanent ? Can the 
lower call into existence the higher ? Can the less include and produce the 
greater ? Can blind diversity summon into being conscious unity ? — in a 
word, can mud produce mind, or body create soul ? 

It is no answer to this to say that we cannot comprehend or explain any 
form of existence beyond the reach of our physical senses ; for it is not a 
question of what we can comprehend or explain, but of what we are bound 
to infer. It is true that' we may not be able to say anything about the origin, 
of mind, or to explain how mind became active in producing matter, but 
neither can we explain how thought comes to be thought, even at the mo- 
ment of reflection here and now. 

The phenomenon of thought in the case of the dullest rustic, is eveiy whit 
as wonderful and inexplicable as the thought of God. Can the materialist 
tell what matter is ? Nay, the blade of grass defies him as much as Deity. 
The difficulty of comprehending, then, or of giving explanations, is no 
hinderance here to the thcistic conception. The only valid question is : Are 
we, or are we not compelled to draw the conclusion that mind is first and 
deepest, and matter last and superficial ? 

We may admit that the world of spirit is a world of mystery ; but are we 
not driven to infer its reality ? What mind may be apart from matter, we 
may not know; but are we not compelled to date matter from mind in a 
descending scale ? The whole tendency of science is to show that this 
is inevitable. Matter is purposeless and multitudinous, and it is mind that 
has to come in to set in order, to unite, to direct, to combine the whole, and 
to form a conception of the whole as a universe. And surely, if mind is 
necessary to form a conception of a universe, it is not less necessary for 
the production of a universe. 
4 



50 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

If materialism were all the truth, that is, if matter were first and supreme, 
the dominant forces should be all solid and most palpably material. But the 
fact is, that the nearer we get to the controlling forces of nature, the farther 
we get away from the palpable and solid. It is unceasingly urged upon us 
by nature that the unseen world is a world of causes, of primary forces, of 
permanent powers. All the most powerful and universal forces are now re- 
ferred to minute vibrations of an almost infinitely attenuated form of matter. 

Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and probably vitality and gravitation, 
are believed to be but modes of the motion of a space-filling ether. Thus all 
the manifestations of force in the material world are produced by a form 
of matter so impalpable that only by its effects does it become known to us 

How easy, then, is it to infer, nay, how inevitable is the inference thai 
the unseeen universe is the universe of abiding energies ! And how surely 
we are led on to the conclusion that an order of beings may dwell there, 
who have the tremendous advantage of the use of those ethereal forces 
which are the overflowing fountain from which all forces, all motion, all 
life upon the earth originate ! 

Every atom of the tree's trunk, every fiber of the corn-blade, and every 
tint of the rose, is but an outward and visible effect of an inward and spirit- 
ual essence. A ceaseless ebb and flow of life between the seen and unseen 
is going on, and the life seems to begin in the unseen. With what solem- 
nity and pathos does nature, in. her loftiest movements and monitions, pro- 
claim that ' the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which arc 
not seen are eternal ? ' 

Not the least of the many reasons for holding by our faith in the Spirit- 
world as the world of causes is this : that it supplies the key to some of life's 
darkest problems ; gives unity and direction to all forms of being ; explains 
the stream of tendencies that works for righteousness by working for per- 
fection through personal or structural development ; suggests that nothing 
is high or low, great or small, to the one Infinite Power; obliterates the 
distinction between natural and supernatural, and presents the inspiration 
of the everliving spirit as a permanent means of intercourse between the 
human and the divine ; and while it shows us that all things are moving on to 
vaster, fuller, diviner life, it interprets and transfigures all the world's re- 
ligions, and enthrones justice to every living thing as the supreme law of 
the universe. 

Not more mysterious or incredible is it that God should be, than that the 
soul of man should be. In our own nature we find infinite wonders, per- 
plexities and riddles. The growth of a blade of grass is to us as inexplica- 
ble as the solar system. If a grain of dust, why not a universe ? If the 
blaze of a candle, why not the starry firmament ? If a human spirit, why not 
the spirit supreme ; conscious of itself and of every infinitesimal part of the 
universe; personal, nay, super-personal, but without circumscription; ia- 



CENTEAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 51 

finite and eternal, that is without extent or duration ; as really present here, 
where I am speaking to you, as in the brightest stars ; as active in the oper- 
ations of Terrestrial Nature as in the sublime manifestations of the higher 
spiritual spheres ? ' This is heaven, in which we live, and move, and are, 
we and all mundane bodies,' says Kepler, the great astronomer." 

When a great discovery flashed upon that astronomer's 
mind, he knelt in silence and said, " I am rethinking the 
thoughts of God." 

Of materialistic scientists who would put the persistence 
of force in place of a ruling mind, this writer says : 

" What, then, in its last analysis, is this force that persists but the equiv- 
alent of a divine energy ? What is this ' unknown force ' but spiritual 
causation ; and what is spiritual causation in the universe but the action of 
the Supreme Spiritual Intelligence ? To say, then, that the eternity of 
matter and persistence of force do away with the necessity of a Deific 
Cause, is to utter a mere opinion, having no claim whatever to be accepted 
as scientific 

It is time to rebuke that rash arrogance of anti-theistic physicists, which 
leads them to put forth as doctrines what are mere undemonstrated hypoth- 
eses, and who make no distinction between science in the state of hypothesis, 
and science in the state of fact. These confident gentlemen, who know 
exactly how man came into being and wbence he is derived, if they do not 
also know whither he goes, know a great deal more than there is any scien- 
tific evidence of. So long as no one can define for us the properties of carbon, 
hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in such a way that we can conceive how 
from the sum of them a soul arises, so long is it simple charlatanry in Ma- 
terialism to affect to speak authoritatively on the great questions of man's 
origin and destiny. Evolution may be true, since it is not inconceivable 
that evolution may be the Divine order of creation ; but so far as there is 
any evidence at all of a pre-historic man, he is seen to be as thoroughly a 
man, and with as distinct a separation from the ape, as is the modern man. 
This is the testimony (1878) of Virchow, the eminent German histologist." 

The London Times, commenting on some scientific dis- 
coveries of Mr. Norman Lockyear, given before the Paris 
Academy of Science and the Royal Society, says they show 
that " all matter may turn out to be varied forms of one 
.primitive element." 

Of this the Banner of Light says : 

"In connection with the above it may not be uninteresting to our readers 



52 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

to peruse the following passages translated from Bornouf, which we find in 
Epes Sargent's ' Proof Palpable of Immortality ' : 

' The unity of physical forces is the point on which Science has its eyes 
now fixed. Materialism is not more eager than Spiritualism for the proof.' 

'Heat, electricity, light, magnetism, chemical attraction, muscular energy, 
and mechanical work are exhibitions of one and the same power acting 
through matter.' 

' All physical phenomena have one and the same primordial agent as their 
original generator.' 

' Chemistry, by its theory of equivalents, is tending to unity. Few intel- 
ligent chemists now regard the elements ranked as simple as being simple 
any further than the present imperfection of our instruments compels us to. 
class them as such.' 

' The substance of things evades all chemical testing ; and so the simple 
bodies of chemistiy are themselves only forms, more or less elementary, 
the agglomeration of which produces compounds.' 

' If by the theory of equivalents these forms should be some day reduced 
to unity, chemistry will be entitled to infer, with some reason, the substan- 
tial unity of the universe.' 

' To reduce all this multiplicity of things to a single principle, has been, 
and continues to be, the ever-recurring problem. In physical science, in 
astronomy, in chemistry, in physiology and psychology, the tendency now is 
toward unity. As we draw nearer to a principle of unity we draw nearer 
to a conception of God.' 

According to Leibnitz (and there are few greater names than his in phi- 
losophy) all substance is essentially a force. Active force is everywhere ; 
it is the true principle of all corporeal phenomena; it is in the plant, in the 
animal, in the man, in the angel ; it is in the earth, and in the highest 
heavens ; it is the fundamental life of all beings. And what is this force 
but an efflux from the central energy to which the universe owes its ex- 
istence and its continuance from minute to minute. 

' Things compound,' says Swedenborg, ' derive their origin from things 
simple ; things simple from the Infinite ; and the Infinite from itself, as 
being the sole cause of itself and of all things.' " 

Thus Science tends toward unit}^ of force ; back of that 
is unity of mind, and will, — God. Let Science step into 
that light and life, and its methods and spirit gain in per- 
fectness and catholicity, and the Conflict of Science and 
Religion ends. Never can it end in any other way. They 
will then be irresistible allies. 

Said an old Hindoo, in the Veclas — oldest of all books: 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 53 

" That all-pervading Spirit, which gives light to the visible 
sun, the same in kind am I, though infinitely distant in 
degree." The inspired Russian poet, Derzhaven, wrote 
wisely as well as beautifully, a century ago : 

"Yes, in my spirit doth thy spirit shine 
As shines the sunbeam in a drop of dew. 



Thy light, thy love, in their bright plenitude 
Filled me with an immortal soul, to spring 
Over the abyss of death, and bade it wear 
The garments of eternal day, and wing 
Its heavenly flight beyond this little sphere — 
Even to its Source, to thee, its Author there." 

A great thinker and spiritual seer in our own land, who 
has passed from an eminent and useful public life to the 
Summer Land but a few years ago, Selden J. Finney, of 
California, said in an inspired hour : 

" The expanded earth and the unfolded heavens are manifestations of an 
Eternal Spirit. The rocks, hills, valleys, rivers, ocean, and stars gleam with 
the white splendors of the Divine Reason. The spiritual idea of substance 
is arising from science. All bodies are now proved to be only petrified 
forms of force ; all forces are proved, by their mutual transformability, to 
be only modes of the action of some common, simple, homogeneous, invisi- 
ble or spiritual Power ; and all power is eternal, infinite, and divine 

The fraternity of souls and the paternity of God rest, at last, on the iden- 
tity of the original substance of each being. If human spirits are the 
children of God — if the idea of the fatherhood of God be not a delusion — 
then the substance of the Creator is the foundation of each soul. The 
identity of the primordial essence of the human and the Divine Spirit is the 
only logical basis ; and it is on this foundation alone that religion itself is 
possible." 

It is a long wa} r from the fearful doctrine of total deprav- 
ity to this conception of the essential unit} r of man and 
God. The one belongs to the Saurian age of theological 
dogmatism, the other glows with the dawning light of a 
higher spiritual dispensation. 

Spending a few days in Philadelphia in the Centennial 
summer, I found reported in a Chicago journal a discourse 



54 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

delivered in that city by my friend Lyman C. Howe, "Who 
and where is God?" and went out into Franklin Square one 
lovely Sunday morning, to sit beneath the great trees, and 
listen to the bird-songs as my sacred music, and read this 
discourse as my church-service — acceptable and profitable. 
I extract from it to help us on this high theme : 

"We know of no better method of approaching the subject than by tak- 
ing some finite standard with which you are all more or less familiar; and 
the highest possible standard we know is man, for man is the climax of 
natural production. Take man then as the standard, and reason from man 
with infinite aspirations and resources, toward the infinite, the uncompre- 
hended God, and what do we find ? We find man materially limited and 
bounded by the laws of matter ; we find man spiritually indwelling here, 
reciprocating the limitations of this material form, but in his inward life 
and aspiration outreaching and expanding without bounds and soaring 
away upon the wings of life and love to grapple with the infinite, the 
divine. We find man also in his inter-relations here possessed of two grand 
attributes, the voluntary and the involuntary ; and since man is derived 
from nature and God, we must conclude that those forces from which man 
is derived must possess the corresponding elements, else they could not 
generate them. Man's voluntary nature is the direct subject of his con- 
sciousness, his desire and his intellect, his spirituality, his mentality. His 
involuntary nature is not the subject of his consciousness, but acts without 
it. His heart beats, blood circulates, nerves vibrate, sensation acts, without 
any intent. Were man compelled to preside over all these functions of the 
body and see to the circulation and at every instant watch the pulses, watch 
digestion, and assimilation, and distribution, and carry on all the processes 
of life by his special superintendency, he would find his existence a failure. 
Yet there are missions which man is compelled to watch and continually 
direct by his conscious volition, and this constitutes the part of life which it 
is the special purpose of all labor to educate and perfect. 

Let us judge God in the same sense then. Nature exhibits everywhere the 
evidence of plan, design, direction. It also exhibits perpetual movement 
and interchange, which does not employ special volition, and yet which 
works so completely, and in order and sympathy therewith, blending and 
harmonizing with all the relations of higher mentality, that they are inter- 
changeable in their action, and sometimes mistaken for each other. The 
volition of man is never independent; it is always subject. Desire always 
precedes it; conditions precede desire; desire being an outgrowth of the ac- 
tivities of the life, the chemistry of the human combination. Motive is born 
of desire. The intellect and its reasonings come in for a manifest claim ; 
and thus the individual works out many a problem, always limited by cir- 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 55 

cumstances, conditions, and involuntary action. Yet, by a conscious effort 
directing the will, by desire and motive and intellectual purpose, it works 
to an end, but can never work independently of involuntary action. Let 
us then suppose the same of the infinite mind — that there is both plan and 
direction, reason and consciousness, memory and volition, and that there is 
also universal action that needs no superintendence, but which moves in 
harmony, and rolls under the divine rhythm of the universal constitution in 
the same completeness that your lives physically and spiritually move on, 
while you are far away in your mental contemplations. While your mind 
is fixed upon some special problem that you are to solve, — while your 
thoughts are reaching far into the dim distance of the hereafter, your spirit- 
ual being, with its constitutional functions and principles, is still acting with 
all its divine harmony, only less manifest as the mental motives and volun- 
tary action is further removed from its connection, for there is always a 
mutual modification between these intimate actions. But again, while you 
are individualized, while you have consciousness, sensation, memory, feel- 
ing, desire, motive, volition, and also involuntary action and life — while 
j'ou have personality that is more or less confined to the recognition of the 
body and its circumference, yet your personality is not entirely bounded by 
these, nor is your life thought or feeling limited to the simple range of the 
surface of your body, but the mind lives and acts more outside of you than 
inside. You are in your relations interchanging more through those subtile 
and unseen vibrations of energy and of substance than from any absolute 
contact known as solid touch ; and there is no limitation to this extent of 
your mentality, no limitation to the reach of this spiritual expansion. At 
the same time you recognize within this individuality that you reside more 
within your vital functions than in the extremities, more in your brain than 
in your feet, more in your heart than in your hand ; that you have in these 
vital centers more consciousness, sensation, individuality, power — every- 
thing that makes up your personality. But while these are only central 
functions from which your individuality outflows, if you were confined en- 
tirely to these vital centers without their connections, without their expan- 
sion and universal outreaching, your life would be meager indeed. In 
proportion as you do live within the environments of your physical being 
and the immediate tangible circumstances by which you are surrounded — 
in that proportion are you a spiritual pauper; but in proportion as you live 
out of and above the limitations of the flesh, out of and above these enslav- 
ing environments, are you enabled to touch the interior centers and feel the 
divine influences and emotions that breathe and sing from the bosom of God. 
Then we may assume the same of the infinite toward which we are reason- 
ing. Where is it ? We can not suppose that mind, love, sentiment, volition, 
reason, reside as much, as really, as absolutely in the granite as in the rose, 
nor in the rose as in that higher blossom, the outgrowth of the ages — the 
human being ; nor yet can we suppose that they dwell in the human being 



56 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

whose qualities are eternally ripening but never fall from the tree of life in 
this limited sphere bounded by the senses and the narrow circumstances 
of mortality, as they do in those far-reaching 1 circumstances and influences 
that border the infinite land. Hence, while God is on earth, while he is all 
around you, while he breathes in the sunshine and blossoms in the flower, 
sings in the thunders of Niagara, voices himself in old ocean's tides, in the 
rivulets and in the warbles of the bird ; yet he is more typified and highly 
manifest in that interior realm far withdrawn from these externalisms — not 
locally so much as in spirit and in fact ; and so withdrawn, he lives and 
throbs and sings more in the voices of the Spirit-world, and in those spheres 
of inner life and contemplation where all of these lower emblems or pri- 
mates center, and where humanity is exalted, spiritualized, intensified, har- 
monized, and made to feel the depth of his divinity and integrity." 

We speak of the Infinite Being, yet person has no more 
limitation than being, and impersonality can have no will 
or intelligence, and is only force. We are far too narrow 
in our conception of personalit} 7 , human or divine. 

Man is an individual and personal intelligence, yet his 
thoughts outrun the lightning and outreach the stars. His 
personality we may call the center of his being ; its wide 
circumference, who shall reach? The French philosopher 
Des Cartes said, Cogito ergo sum: ' ; I think, therefore I 
am ; " and this power of thought is proof of our personal 
being. The plan and purpose manifest in the universe 
prove an eternal and infinite thought — a Being, personal 
yet infinite. We cannot compass infinit}', but reason, judg- 
ment and intuition, and reverence and sympathy as well, 
are better satisfied by a spiritual philosophy, with a living 
God as its central and inspiring soul, than by the negations 
of materialism. 

The scientific theory of evolution is impossible without in- 
dwelling and designing mind . ' ' The ascent of matter implies 
the descent of spirit." A positive will must guide the force 
that ever lifts matter to higher forms. The thought and 
will of man evolve new and higher forms, so far as their 
range extends, and hence comes growth in art and archi- 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 57 

tecture, but the thought and will of Deity are everywhere, 
uplifting and evolving all. Mind must marshal and array 
atoms and particles for their new departures up the spiral 
pathway. As in the growth of worlds and races through 
long ages, so it is in the annual transfigurations which 
surprise and delight us. God transmutes the dry seed and 
the black mud into the delicate hue and shape and the fine 
fragrance of the rose, because the divine Mind, working 
through the law of the flower's growth, vitalizes and re- 
fines the stuff it uses to reveal a gleam of the infinite 
Beauty. How poor and barren all miracles of theology 
compared to this ! 

We are told of atoms and molecules ; but what is moving 
them? They move to some purpose, and there can be no 
purpose without mind. We are sent back to protoplasm — 
"the physical basis of life," — the same in vegetable and 
animal under microscopic and chemical tests. Whence its 
wide differentiation ? We must go back to mind, using force 
and law as its faithful and unswerving servants. No doubt 
all law and force are in matter ; but they are not derived from 
it, or secondary to it, as materialism teaches. Matter is 
negative and plastic as clay in the hands of the potter to 
the spiritual potency which controls it and is inseparable 
from it. Science must take in the foundation idea of a 
spiritual genesis, and so enlarge its scope and reverse its 
philosophy. It must study nature and man in the light of 
interior principles, and then test and verify its work by in- 
ductive experiment. It must know the inner-life of things. 

Darwin could thus write a new Origin of Species. He 
would show the influence of external nature in modifying 
the types of life, and enlarge on "the survival of the 
fittest" ; but he would also emphasize what he now fails even 
to recognize — interior force and law guided by mind, ever 
uplifting and refining all to work out a progressive and 



58 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

divine design, — and so make his gi'eat work rich and com- 
plete where it is now poor and imperfect. He and his co- 
workers might take a valuable lesson from the terse and 
clear statement of S. J. Finney. On the origin of species 
he said : 

"Function before organ, force before function, power before force, ideas 
before power, and a unitive and transcendental reason before ideas, — or 
rather as the essence, substance, and constitution in which ideas are evolved." 

William Denton well says : 

" Leaving out of view, as Darwin and his school do, the spiritual side 
of the universe, I regard his theory as radically defective. I could as soon 
believe that a boulder rolling down a mountain-stream could be fashioned 
into a perfect bust of Daniel Webster, as that natural selection could trans- 
form a gelatinous clot into intelligent man. An infinite and intelligent 
spirit, in my opinion, presides over the universe, and natural laws are its 
instruments." 

In the old Hindoo Bhagvat Geeta, the idea of Brahma — 
the Infinite Spirit — is given in words full of grandeur and 
beauty. 

"lam the father and mother of the world, .... the Holy One worthy 

to be known I am the comforter; the creator; the witness; the 

asylum, and the friend They who serve other gods with a firm be- 
lief, in doing so involuntarily worship even me. I am he who partaketh 
of all worship, and I am their reward. I am the soul which standeth in the 
bodies of all beings I am all-grasping death, and I am the resurrec- 
tion of those about to be I am the seed of all in nature ; not any- 
thing animate or inanimate is without me." 

Anaxagoras said Intellect was the first moving force, 
shaping chaos into things ; and Zeno called God the 
Reason of the world, the life-giving Soul. Twenty-five 
hundred years ago the Greek Pythagoras taught : 

" There is One Universal Soul, diffused through all things — eternal, un- 
changeable, invisible; in essence like truth, in substance resembling li^'ht; 
not to be represented by any image, to be comprehended -only by the mind; 
not, as some conjecture, exterior to the world, but, in himself entire, per- 
vading the universal sphere." 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 59 

Theodore Parker, speaking in Music Hall to a New Eng- 
land audience, said : 

"The whole universe of matter is a great mundane psalm to celehrate 
the reign of Power, Law, and Mind. Fly through the solar system from 
remotest Neptune to the Sun, study each planet, it is the same. Ask eveiy 
little orange-leaf, ask the aphis that feeds thereon, ask the insect corpses 
lying by millions in the dead ashes of the farmer's peat-fire, the remains 
of mollusks that gave up the ghost millions of years before man trod the 
globe, — they all, with united voice, answer still the same, — Power, Law, 
Mind. In all the space from Neptune to the Sun, in all time from 
silicious shell to the orange-leaf of to-day, there is no failure of that power, 
no break of that law, no cessation in its constant mode of operation, no 
error of that mind whereof all space is here, all time is now. So the world 
is witness continually to power, the never-failing law, to mind that is every- 
where ; is witness to that ever-present Power which men call God. Look 
up and reverence ; look down and trust." 

Andrew Jackson Davis says : 

" The laws that govern nature go on with a steady and unchangeable 

progression They are established by one great Positive Power or 

Mind. . This Power men call Deity, whose attributes are Love and Wisdom, 
corresponding with the principles of male and female, positive and neg- 
ative, sustaining and creative The growth of trees or flowers or 

animals is invariably attended with chemical, mechanical, and physiological 
changes ; hence the conclusion that the Deity is a substance moving sub- 
stance, but the moving principle must be superior to that which is moved. 
.... Nature testifies most positively that Deity acts universally upon 
matter in seven distinct but converging ways : first, anatomically ; second, 
physiologically ; third, mechanically ; fourth, chemically ; fifth, electrically ; 

sixth, magnetically; and seventh, spiritually The anatomy, plrysi- 

ology, mechanism, and chemistry of the rose tend to a beauteous flower ; 
although all these processes take place in the germ of the rose with the 
minutest and most distinct precision, yet there are but three actions or pro- 
cesses apparent — namely, Association, Progress, and unfolding, or Devel- 
opment. So with everything in nature The first three modes by 

which the Divine substance acts on and moves the substance of Nature — 
viz., the anatomical, physiological, and mechanical modes — are simply 
manifestations of the Principle of Motion ; also the fourth and fifth modes — 
viz., the chemical and electrical — are manifestations of the Principle of 
Life; that the sixth — the magnetic action — is only another name for the 
Priuciple of Sensation ; and that the seventh — the Spiritual — is a mani- 
festation of the higher principle of vitality, which we term Intelligence.. 



60 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

Motion, Life, Sensation, and Intelligence, unfold themselves into an organi- 
zation of elementary and divine principles, which govern all the vast con- 
gregations of matter we see in Nature. Motion was first especially mani- 
fested in the Mineral kingdom; Life in the Vegetable ; Sensation in the 
Animal ; and Intelligence in the Human kingdom ; but as we ascend the 
successive kingdoms in the development of Nature, we perceive these 
principles of action to be more and more progressive toward perfection. 
.... Thus the vegetable is actuated, not only by motion, but also by life ; 
and the animal not only by motion and life, but by sensation combined with 
them; and the human organization is actuated by motion, life, and sensa- 
tion, in a perfect state of combination, which combination develops an eter- 
nal intelligence." 

The splendid fabric of modern science is based on 
assumptions and theories. It is compelled to go back to 
the invisible and the intangible, — to the all-pervading 
ether, to eternal force and law, to the self-evident axioms 
of mathematics, — and yet it denies, or will not affirm or 
assume, the Infinite and Eternal Mind, because we cannot 
see God as we see these mortal bodies ! Take away these 
scientific assumptions, or theories, and the fabric totters to 
its fall. The theories are good, they are the only basis science 
has to work on, the results prove them, yet not one of these 
foundations of science can be proved by any experiment that 
our senses can knoiv. Far more clearly, to the spiritual 
thinker, do Nature and man prove that God must be, and 
we sa}^ to the scientist, " Go back of law to mind, and you 
see more and better." The great authority and the real ser- 
vice of science, in this day of the decay of old theology, 
makes us blind to its limitations and imperfect methods. 

It is remarkable that the historic men who are held in 
high esteem and reverence by materialists were not materi- 
alists, but wrought bravely for liberty of conscience in the 
strength and inspiration of spiritual ideas. Voltaire said : 

"Continue to cultivate virtue, to be beneficent, to regard all superstition 
with horror or with pity ; but adore, with me, the design manifest in all 
nature, and consequently the Author of that design Eeligion, you 



CENTEAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 61 

say, has produced thousands of crimes, — say, rather, superstition, which 
unhappily reigns over this globe ; it is the most cruel enemy of the pure 

adoration due to the Supreme Being To be a disciple of God is to 

announce him as of a mild heart and an unalterable mind." 

Thomas Paine wrote his Age of Reason to counteract 
the atheistic tendencies of the French Revolution, and said : 

<; I believe in one God, and no more, and hope for happiness beyond this 

life The existence of an Almighty power is sufficiently demonstrated 

to us, though we cannot conceive, as it is impossible we should, the nature 
and manner of its existence. We cannot conceive how we came here our- 
selves, and yet we know we are here The creation is the Bible of the 

Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the cer- 
tainty of his existence and the immutability of his power Every part 

of science, whether connected with the properties of inanimate matter, with 
the geometry of the universe, or with the systems of animal and vegetable 
life, is a text as well for devotion as for philanthropy, for gratitude as for 
human improvement. It will, perhaps, be said that if such a revolution in 
the system of religion takes place, every preacher ought to be a philosopher. 

Most certainly, and every house of devotion a school of science 

The consciousness of existence is the only conceivable idea we can have of 
another life, and the continuance of that consciousness is immortality. 
This consciousness, or the knowing that we exist, is not necessarily confined 
to the same form, nor to the same matter, even in this life. We have not 
always the same forcn, nor in any case the same matter, that composed our 
bodies twenty years ago. Limbs may be lost and this full consciousness 
remains. We know not how much or how little of our composition, or how 
exquisitely fine that little is, that creates in us the consciousness of existence. 
.... Who can say by what exceeding fine action of fine matter, a thought 
is produced in what we call the mind ; and yet, when produced, as I now 
produce the thought I am writing, it is capable of becoming immortal, and 
is the only production of man that has that capacity. Statues of brass or 
marble will perish, and statues made in imitation of them are not the same. 
But print or reprint a thought a thousand times over, carve it in wood or 
engrave it on stone, that thought is identically and eternally the same, un- 
affected by any change of matter. If the thing produced has in itself the 
capacity to become immortal, it is more than a token that the power that 
produced it, which is the self-same thing as our consciousness of existence, 
is immortal also." 

These words of these grand old heretics are full of spirit- 
ual light and life ; there is no materialism in them. 

Bacon, the great interpreter of inductive science, said : 



62 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

" So far are physical causes from drawing men off from God and Provi- 
dence, that, on the contrary, the philosophers employed in discovering them 
can find no rest but by flying to God and Providence at last." 

William Law, in England, a hundred and fifty years ago, 
wrote : 

"All Nature is itself a birth from God. Creation out of nothing is a 
fiction of theology. So far is Nature from being out of nothing, that it is 
the manifestation of that in God which before was not manifest ; and ' as 
Nature is the manifestation of God, so all creatures are the manifestations 

of the powers of Nature Properly and strictly speaking, nothing can 

begin to be. The beginning of everything is nothing more than its beginning 
in a new state." 

A few years ago a book on " The Idea of God," by 
M. Caro, was published in Paris, and was honored with the 
" crowning notice " of the French Academy. Its closing 
passage is as follows : 

" It is then the living God, the intelligent God, that we believe in, and 
not the God of Naturalism which would be only a geometric law or a blind 
force ; and not the Hegelian God, a result and product of the universe ; and 
not the God of a new idealism, which, to save his divinity, takes away his 
reality. We affirm, in opposition to all these subtile conceptions, that a per- 
fect Being non-existent would not be perfect ; that a pure ideal of human 
thought is in no sense God ; that if he is not substance, he is but a concept, 
a pure category of the speculative intellect, a creation and dependence of 
human thought which in being extinguished annihilates its God ; that if he 
is not Cause he is the most useless of beings ; that if he is Cause, he is dis- 
tinct from the series of his effects ; and finally, if he is Cause, he is Reason, 
Thought, supreme and conscious of itself; for if he is not that, he would 
be but a fatalistic agent, a blind world-energy inferior to that which it pro- 
duces, since in the organic system of his effects emerges the intelligence of 
which they deprive him, and in man alone is manifest the divine reason. 

One last trait, and our definition will be completed. This living and in- 
telligent God is also the loving. God ; otherwise he would not be entitled to 
our adoration, which is the supreme degree of love. One does not adore a 
law, however simple and admirable it may be ; one does not adore a blind 
force, however powerful and universal it may be ; one does not adore an 
ideal, however pure, if it be a mere abstraction ; one adores only the Being 
who is the living and the perfect; the perfection of reality under its highest 
forms, Thought and Love. All other adoration is nonsensical if addressed 
to a pure abstraction, an idolatry if it has to do merely with the incognita- 



CENTRAL IDEA OF A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 63 

tive substance of the universe. A living, a loving, and a conscious God, — 
such he is as reason conceives him, and the religious conscience of man 
requires him. Such is our God." 

A gifted woman in our own land puts her thought and 
aspiration in eloquent words, as follows : 

The Mountaineer's Prater. 

" Girt me with the strength of Thy steadfast hills ! 

The speed of Thy streams give me ! 
In the spirit that calms, with the life that thrills, 

I would stand or run for Thee. 
Let me be Thy voice, or Thy silent power, — 

As the cataract or the peak, — 
An eternal thought in my earthly hour, 

Of the living God to speak. 

Clothe me in the rose-tints of Thy skies 

Upon morning summits laid ; 
Robe mc in the purple and gold that flies 

Through Thy shuttles of light and shade ; 
Let me rise and rejoice in thy smile aright, 

As mountains and forests do ; 
Let me welcome Thy twilight and Thy night, 

And wait for Thy dawn anew ! 

Give me of the brook's faith, joyously sung 

Under clank of its icy chain ! 
Give me of the patience that hides among 

Thy hill-tops in mist and rain ! 
Lift me up from the clod ; let me breathe Thy breath ; 

Thy beauty and strength give me ! 
Let me lose both the name and the meaning of death 

In the life that I share with Thee ! " 

Ltjct Larcom, in Sunday Afternoon. 

Last year, in the pleasant month of May, a distinguished 
scientific scholar passed on to the higher life from Wash- 
ington, — Professor Joseph Henry, President of the Smith- 
sonian Institution. He was ripe in years, and in wisdom 
and beauty of life as well, beloved and reverenced by all 
who knew him. On the 12th of April, 1878, he wrote a 



64 A SUPREME INDWELLING MIND THE 

letter to Joseph Patterson, of Philadelphia, but was too 
much fatigued to revise it for the mail, and it was found in 
his desk and taken out by his family, being probably the 
last letter lie ever wrote. The extracts given will show 
that he did not belong to the materialistic school, and the 
clearness of his statements make them of especial value. 

" What mysteries of unfathomable depth environ us on every side ; but 
after all our speculations and attempts to grapple with the problem of the 
universe, the simplest conception which explains and connects the phe- 
nomena is that of the existence of one spiritual being, infinite in wisdom, in 
power, and all divine perfections; which exists always and everywhere; 
which has created us with intellectual faculties sufficient in some degree to 
comprehend his operations as they are developed in nature by what is called 
' science.' This being is unchangeable, and therefore his operations are 
always in accordance with the same laws, the conditions being the same. 
Events that happened a thousand years ago will happen again a thousand 
years to come, providing the condition of existence is the same. Indeed, a 
universe not governed by law would be a universe without the evidence of an 
intellectual director. In the scientific explanation of physical phenomena 
we assume the existence of a principle having properties sufficient to pro- 
duce the effects which we observe ; and when the principle so assumed ex- 
plains by logical deductions from it all the phenomena, we call it a theory ; 
thus we have the theory of light, the theory of electricity, etc. There is no 
proof, however, of the truth of these theories except the explanation of the 
phenomena which they are invented to account for. This proof, however, 
is sufficient in any case in which every fact is fully explained, and can be 
predicted when the conditions are known. 

"In accordance with this scientific view, on what evidence does the exist- 
ence of a Creator - rest ? First, it is one of the truths best established by ex- 
perience in my own mind that I have a thinking, willing principle within 
me, capable of intellectual activity and of moral feeling. Second, it is 
equally clear to me that you have a similar spiritual principle within your- 
self, since when I ask you an intelligent question you give me an intellectual 
answer. Third, when I examine the operations of nature I find everywhere 
through them evidences of intellectual arrangements, of contrivances to 
reach definite ends precisely as I find in the operations of man ; and hence 
I infer that these two classes of operations are results of similar intelligence. 
Again, in my own mind I find ideas of right and wrong, of good and evil. 
These ideas then exist in the universe, and therefore form a basis of our 
ideas of a moral universe. Furthermore, the conceptions of good which are 
found among our ideas associated with evil, can be attributed only to a being 
of infinite perfections like that which we denominate ' God.' " 



CENTRAL IDEA OP A SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 65 

These thoughtful words of a gifted man may fitly close 
this array of testimony, reaching through the ages. Hin- 
doo and Greek and Hebrew, European and American, phi- 
losopher, teacher, seer, and spiritual-minded scientist agree 
in essence, on these eternal verities of the soul and of God. 
They give us the higher aspects of the God-idea in history. 
That idea is not merely a fleeting and unreal conception, 
born of fear, and wonder, and blind reverence, to fade and 
die with the larger culture of humanity. It is the result 
of the unity of the human and Divine essence, such as led 
the inspired Russian poet, Derzhaven, to exclaim : 

" Yes, in my spirit doth thy Spirit shine, 
As shines the sunbeam in a drop of dew ! " 

It is man's innate cognizance of the great and all-sustain- 
ing central Reality and Soul, proved and verified by the 
glor}' and beauty of Nature. Therefore it stands and gains, 
and will endure. 
5 



THE INNER LIFE. -FACTS OF SPIRIT- 
PRESENCE. 



"This dusty house, wherein is shrined 
The soul, is but the counterfeit 
Of that which shall be, more refined 

And exquisite, 
When death shall come, and disallow 

These rough and ugly masks we wear, 
I think that we shall be as now, 
Only more fair." — Alice Carey. 

" Then shall come the Eden-days, 
Guardian watch from seraph-eyes, 
Angels on the slanting rays, 

Voices from the opening skies." — R. W. Emerson. 

THE inspiring idea of an indwelling and infinite Life 
fills ns with a deep desire to know the inner realities 
of tilings, and the inner life of man. We feel that the spirit- 
ual is the real. Materialism wakens no such desire, and 
makes the study of psycho-physiological science, in an ap- 
preciative spirit, almost impossible. Yet a knowledge of 
ps}'chological laws and powers, of psychometry, magnetism, 
clairvo3*ance, and spirit manifestations, is necessary to a 
finer comprehension of these interior and all-sustaining 
realities. In a coming day education will be held incom- 
plete without such study. It will even reach our universi- 
ties, where the best things go last, after " the people have 
heard them gladty." 

The medical faculty, especially the " old school," ignore 

G6 



FACTS OF SPIlilT-PKESENCE. 67 

magnetic healing, and yet so fear and hate it that they 
would rob us of its great benefits by unjust and unconsti- 
tutional laws, virtually forbidding its practice. It is to be 
recognized and studied in medical schools, and the bigotry 
which seeks to impose medical dogmas on the people will 
belong to a darker Past. Physiology and medical science 
must recognize mind in man, — the spiritual force shaping 
and modifying organ and function, the will overmastering 
the body, the subtile psychological and healing influences, 
the soul-power that makes the body its servant and organ, 
— and not grope in the dark among bone, and nerve, and 
tissue, as among the rods and cranks of a machine. 

All the great historic religious teachers and reformers, 
and the Prophets and Apostles of the Old and New Testa- 
ments, were illuminated men, living a spiritual life so ex- 
alted and superior that they were brought into the realm of 
divine truth, and tides of inspiration swept through them, 
not by special miracle, but as result and fit reward of their 
devotedness and consecration. That inspiration cannot be 
limited to any people or age. Samuel Johnson, of Massa- 
chusetts, well said : 

" Never was to chosen race 

That unstinted tide confined ; 
Thine is every time and place, 

Fountain sweet of heart and mind ! 

Breathing in the thinker's creed, 

Pulsing in the hero's blood, 
Nerving simplest thought and deed, 

Freshening time with truth and good. 

Consecrating art and song, 

Holy book and pilgrim track ; 
Hurling floods of tyrant wrong 

From the sacred limits back." 

The}' were often seers, clairvoyants, mediums, helped and 
guided by supernal intelligences ; for all these gifts and 



68 THE INNER LIFE. 

capacities are in and of this wonderful human and divine 
nature of ours. 

What is the Bible, read without this spiritual knowledge? 
A book of strange myths and miracles, which the skeptic 
can, and will, cut in pieces and repudiate. This knowledge 
is the only key to its finer and truer interpretation. Read 
in its light, and the book is not infallible but valuable, the 
historic record of great spiritual experiences. A false the- 
ology makes these experiences miraculous, a spiritual phi- 
losoplry makes them natural and therefore of some practical' 
value. 

" The man Christ Jesus" was eminent in beaut} 7- of life, 
in wealth of intuitive thought, in consecration to truth, in 
love for humanity and Deity, in the clearness of his interior 
sight, and his power to heal the sick. Clairvoyance, me- 
diumship, superior magnetic and psychological powers were 
his. He sent out his twelve apostles (Matt, x.) and " gave 
them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and 
to heal all manner of sickness." He said (Mark xvi.) : 
1 ' And these signs shall follow them that believe : in my 
name shall they cast out devils ; they shall speak in new 

tongues They shall lay hands on the sick and they 

shall recover." Christ said (John xiv.) : " He that believeth 
on me, the works that I do he shall do also ; and greater 
works than these shall he do." We read how Peter cured 
a man lame from birth (Acts hi.); how Paul cured the crip- 
ple at Ly-stra (Acts xix.), and saw "in a vision a man 
named Ananias, coming in, and putting his hand on him 
that he might receive his sight ; " how an angel loosed the 
bands of the imprisoned Peter, and led him out safe and 
free, the gates opening of their own accord as they went. 
From Genesis to Revelation are recorded the gifts and ex- 
periences, the visions and great words of seer and apostle. 
Dogmatic theology makes them supernatural marvels, which 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 69 

the educated materialistic skeptic can make the babble of 
wonder-loving and childish semi-barbarians, and all learned 
theologians cannot refute his critical assaults. The study 
of psycho-physiological science, and the knowledge of mod- 
ern spiritualism, make them events coming under the wide 
sway of natural law, and to be judged by their historic and 
intrinsic probability. As we study these facts and experi- 
ences, in the Testaments and elsewhere, we feel that the 
crude notion that the soul is but a resultant of bodily forces 
is as poor and inadequate to solve them, as its equally crude 
companion-notion that the unintelligent and impersonal po- 
tency of matter evolves suns and stars, paints the flower, 
shapes the eye of the eagle, and balances the insect in mid- 
air on wings of gossamer, is to solve the processes of na- 
ture. The spirit innermost and dominant in man, the 
Supreme Spirit innermost and dominant in nature, must 
be recognized for clearer thought and deeper comprehen- 
sion. Life within, ruling and guiding law and phenomena, 
is the conclusion of the spiritual thinker. 

In the New Testament we find that Paul healed the sick 
"by prayer and the laying on of hands;" and we read 
(1 Cor. xii.) : " There are diversities of gifts, but the same 
Spirit. .... For to one is given, by the Spirit, the word of 

wisdom To another, the gift of healing, by the same 

Spirit ; to another, prophecy (or the gift of preaching); 
.... to another, divers kind of tongues." When like 
gifts are manifested to-da}^ bigots in the sects join' to 
scoff with scientific and professional bigots. To all such 
we would commend the words of that great scientist La 
Place : " It is exceedingly unphilosophical to deny magnetic 
phenomena merely because they are inexplicable in the 
present state of our knowledge." Still further they might 
study and inwardly digest the suggestions of Abercrombie, 
in his " Intellectual Powers " : 



70 THE INNER LIFE. 

" An unlimited skepticism is the part of a contracted mind, which reasons 
upon imperfect data, or makes its own knowledge and extent of observation 
the standard and test of probability In receiving on testimony state- 
ments which arc rejected by the vulgar as totally incredible, a man of culti- 
vated mind is influenced by the recollection that many things at one time 
appeared to him marvelous, which he now knows to be true, and thence 
concludes that there may still be in nature many phenomena and many prin- 
ciples with winch he is entirely unacquainted. In other words, he has 
learned from experience not to make his own knowledge his test of proba- 
bility." 

If they fail to profit by these wise suggestions, their 
names, if at all remembered, will be pilloried on the page 
of history with that of a certain Francois Bazin, a candi- 
date for membership of the Paris Roj'al Society of Medi- 
cine in 1672, who sought to win the favor of that learned 
body by taking for his theme the impossibility of the circu- 
lation of the blood, forty-four years after Harvey had de- 
monstrated that circulation as accepted to-day. 

The knowledge of psychological laws, and of the strength 
or weakness of the will in its positive or negative attitude 
and action, will be a safeguard against weakness and temp- 
tation, and a help to higher virtue and nobler and more self- 
poised character. Some of our liberal religious writers and 
speakers have been educated as clergymen, and such an 
education limits one too much to theological methods and 
ideas. These have their place and value, but are not equal 
to the work of dealing with the thought of to-day. Let them, 
and let us all, study man and his relations, know more of 
the wondrous will-power, so potent for good or ill, of the 
laws of birth and health, and hereditary descent, of the 
sway of soul over body, and the need of spiritual culture, 
of man as ' ; an intelligence served by bodily organs." 
Theological history has its value, but we do not dwell in 
cloisters or creed-bound seminaries, and can find to-day 
deeper and more uplifting lessons than they were built to 
teach. 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 71 

One great result of psjxho-physiological research is to 
verif}' and establish the fact that man has a dual body, — 
an outer and physical form "with its external senses, and 
an interior form, real yet invisible, with its finer spiritual 
senses ; and that death destroj'S the outer body only to 
release the inner form, which it does not and cannot touch, 
that it may enter the upward path to a higher life. When 
the material eye is closed the clairvoyant eye opens, when 
the outward ear is sealed the clairaudient or spiritual sense 
awakens, and these inner sensations are farther-reaching 
and more delicate. Sometimes they are active in this life, 
in the next life they may give broader range and finer per- 
ception to the spirit. The co-existence of these two bodies 
in this life on earth, their separation at death, and the con- 
tinued organic existence of the inner or spiritual body, make 
a rational psychology possible and open the true relations 
between mind and matter, as nothing else can. Without 
this we are in darkness and uncertain tj\ A thoughtful 
scholar, Prof. Knight, says : 

"The spirit shrinks from a ghostly or disembodied state as its perpetual 
destiny nearly as much as it recoils from the sleep of the Buddhist nirvana; 
but how to find a body, how to incarnate itself, or even to conceive the pro- 
cess by which it could by any foreign agency be robed anew, remains a puz- 
zle There are difficulties which attend every attempt to form definite 

conceptions as to the details of this question. Mr. Greg is wise when he 
says of the belief in immortality, ' Let it rest in the vague, if you would 
have it rest unshaken.' " 

With the idea of a dual body we jieed not " rest in the 
vague," or shrink from " a disembodied state," or be puz- 
zled ' ' how to find a body " which we cannot lose. The 
words of an able thinker, in that suggestive book, The 
Unseen Universe, show how the best minds turn in that 
direction. 

" The spiritual body being a perfect resemblance and reproduction, under 
altered conditions, of the natural body, it might be expected that it should 



72 THE INNER LIFE. 

retain the materia] impressions in which memory is supposed to consist. 
Successive acts of consciousness leave indelible traces within us. Every 
thought that rises in our minds is accomplished by some molecular motions 
and displacements in the brain, and parts of these are in some manner stored 
up in the brain-cells so as to produce what maybe called our physical mem- 
ory. Other parts of these subtile motions are communicated, we may be- 
lieve, to the spiritual or unseen body, and are stored up there, forming a 
memory which may be utilized when that body is set free by death and bet- 
ter able to exercise its functions. It will thus retain its hold on the past, 
and serve the grand purpose of maintaining a continuous, intelligent exist- 
ence. Every shade of knowledge and of ignorance, of virtue and of vice, 
of happiness and of misery, will be found in that illimitable country whither 
we tend. The spiritual body also will, by its extreme subtilty and perfect 
subjection to the rule of thought, have means of exhibiting varieties of feel- 
ing such as at present we can but faintly imagine We shall carry 

with us into eternity the elements of our own bliss or woe. Heaven and 
hell spring out of the nature of things. They are indeed present as well as 
future. They begin in time. We are all even now in one or the other of 
these states. In the spiritual body the condition of the soul will only be- 
come more defined, more intense. Remorse, despair, impenitence, a dis- 
turbed conscience — these are hell. The sufferings, however, of the world 
unseen will be spiritual." 

Paul wrote : " There is a natural (or material) body, and 
there is a spiritual body." There is now, in this life, seems 
his thought. Tertullian said, " The soul has the human 
form, the same as its body, only it is delicate, clear, and 
ethereal." John Wesley (see his Life, &c, vol. vi. p. 50, 
on Paul,) said : 

"The soul [as he calls the spiritual body] seems to be the immediate 
clothing of the spirit, .... never separated from it either in life or death. 
It does not seem to be affected by the death of the body, but envelops the 
separate, as it does the embodied spirit ; neither will it undergo any essen- 
tial change when it is clothed upon with the immortal body at the resurrec- 
tion." 

Paul says, too, "Although the outer man perish, the 
inner man is renewed day by day ; " suggesting the thought 
of an imperishable form within ' ' the outer man." 

In the London Psychological Beview, of July, 1878, a 
writer says that we find the idea in Genesis of " a body 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 73 

formed, of matter, dust of the ground ; a soul (nephesh) in 
common with the previous animal creation ; and a spirit 
(ruach) of the very substance of Deity through which man 
becomes a living soul." Tjdor tells, in his Primitive 
Culture, of the early " conception of an apparition-soul 
or ghost-soul, its substance impalpable and invisible, save 
when manifested in dream or vision, with physical power," 
in likeness of the person, and which could leave the body, 
fly swift and far, take possession of the bodies of men or 
animals and act through them. All these are intuitive con- 
ceptions of the dual bod}" of man, reaching indeed toward 
his triune life, of body, soul, and spirit. 

Professor Benjamin Pierce, of Harvard University, one 
of the most eminent mathematicians of our day, and an 
astute and clear thinker, gave a course of lectures at the 
Lowell Institute, Boston, in the winter of 1878-9, in which 
he enters upon this realm of thought, as follows : 

"What shall we say concerning the suffering with which this world is 
afflicted ? "What of sin ? The body is the vocal instrument through which 
the soul communicates with other souls, with his past self, and even, perhaps, 
with his God. Were the communication between soul and soul direct and 
immediate, there would be no protection for thought : each man could take 
full possession of the thoughts of every other man, and there would be no 
such thing as personality and individuality. The body is needed to hold 
souls apart and preserve their independence, as well as for conversation and 
mutual sympathy. Hence body and matter are essential to man's true ex- 
istence. Without them he must, in accordance with the Chinese theology, 
be instantly absorbed into the Infinite Spirit. In this case creation would 
be a false and unmeaning tragedy. The soul which leaves this earthly body 
still requires incorporation. The grandest philosopher who has ever specu- 
lated upon this theme has told us in his sublime epistle that there are celes- 
tial bodies as well as bodies terrestrial. It may not be in vain to strive to 
attain some insight into the possible nature of the celestial bodies, and it 
may, perchance, assist as a reconciliation for sorrow and sin. 

Can we fear lest the substance of the celestial bodies will be less adapted 
to the souls which they are to clothe ? Is is not a fair and just inference 
that each body will be nicely fitted to its soul, as if organized and crystallized 
under the controlling influence from within ? What better suggestion can 



74 THE INNER LIFE. 

be made which shall give us the full benefit of the discipline, education, ties 
axid sympathies of this life ? We shall be known as we are. Soul will 
recognize soul through its external covering with unerring certainty. 

The stature of each body will correspond to the magnitude of the soul. 
The intellectual supremacy and consummate beauty of a Shakspeare will 
be more apparent in his celestial body than is his ideal stature. The coun- 
tenance of the great Lawgiver of Judea will shine as when he descended 
from Mount Sinai. No crown will be needed to designate legitimate royalty, 
nor any celestial aureole encircling their heads to mark the loving and ma- 
jestic presence of the apostles and the true saints. 

We may justly apprehend that the deformity of our future body will con- 
form to our spiritual errors in the present life. Would not such be the 
natural and legitimate punishment of sin ? But, surrounded by love and 
S3 r mpathy, who would not speedily repent and hasten to be restored to his 
intended excellence, and fill heaven with joy at his recovery ? We then 
might recognize how suffering and sin were short-lived violations of mate- 
rial and spiritual law, essential to free agency ; how they w;ere the evidence 
of unlimited potentiality, and how they were amply compensated by the 
freedom and pardon with which they were associated 

We have here five imperfect senses, and they are as much as we can 
manage in this terrestrial world. A lifetime is required for the most of us 
to become journeymen in the use of either of them, and no man has yet 
been known who was the master of them all. Touch, taste, and smell arise 
from objects in immediate contact with the nerves. Their wide range of 
perception in different persons and their great capacity for education give 
us undoubted intimation of how much they may he extended in a more deli- 
cate and sensitive organization. Their variety of character dependent upon 
their location in the nervous system, and their apparent difference in the 
inferior animals, suggest the possibility and probability of increase of vari- 
ety in the future, when they may be usefully employed. Hearing and sight 
by which we communicate with our fellows and perceive distant objects, are 
conveyed by means of vibrations. Auditory vibrations may not be oftener 
than ten in a second, or they may be as many as twenty thousand. Visual 
vibrations, on the contrary, are not less than four hundred millions of mil- 
lions in a second, and may be as many as eight hundred millions of millions. 

Between these two limits what a vast range of untried perception ! There 
is ample room for more than forty new senses, each of which might have 
its own peculiar effect upon the nerves of the observer, and give a corres- 
ponding variety of information and opportunity for scientific study, for the 
invention of strange varieties of microscope, telescope, and spectroscope to 
strengthen the new senses for beautiful art, and for the development of the 
grand or lovely forms of poetic fancy and imagination. Such is the glory 
of the intellectual future life naturally suggested by Christian philosophy. 
Jt is the natural and reasonable expansion of the ideal development, which 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 75 

began with the nebular theory. Judge the tree by its fruit. Is this mag- 
nificent display of ideality a human delusion, or is it a divine record ? The 
heavens and the earth have spoken to declare the glory of God. It is not a 
tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. It is the poem of an infinite im- 
agination signifying immortality." 

His words glow with the light and warmth of the Spirit- 
ual Philosophy, yet a large experience and knowledge of 
clairvo3 T ance and spirit-presence and power would have 
made his fine statements still more clear and perfect. 

Spiritual science and psycho-physiological research have 
made the greatest addition of our age to our knoivledge and 
systematic conception of the life of man, its phenomena, 
relations, and future continuity. They are teaching us that 
the spiritual life and the thought of 'man inhere in an inte- 
rior and lasting organization, a fine body, of a substance 
invisible and supra-physical, not in any gland or vessel, or 
tissue, or structure that death can dissolve. 

The following letter from Myra Carpenter to Joseph 
Baker — the capacity and personal character of both being 
indorsed by William Denton — gives a glimpse of the clair- 
voyant experiences which reveal the great fact that the 
spiritual body triumphs over death, and so we " still live," 
personal and individual, be}-ond the grave. Miss Carpen- 
ter tells of her mother's translation to the higher life : 

" My mother and I had often talked of death and immortality. She fre- 
quently magnetized me when she was in health, and I was in the clairvoyant 
state, by her assistance, when the spiritual sight was first given me. By 
your assistance (Baker's), I acquired the power of putting myself in that 
state without the assistance of an operator. She had often requested that 
I would, at the time of her decease, put myself in that state, and carefully 
notice the departure of the spirit from the body. Her failing health admon- 
ished her that her end, for this life, was near; but she viewed it with 
calmness, for her thoughts were full of the life to come, and her hopes 
placed on her Father in Heaven. Death had no terrors for her. When she 
felt its approach, she sent for me, as I was absent attending an invalid. I 
came, and remained constantly with her, until she left us for a better home. 
Her last words were addressed to me. Perceiving that she was dying, I 
seated myself in the room, and was soon in a state of spiritual clairvoyance. 



76 THE INNER LIFE. 

With the opening of the inner sight, the painful scene of a mother's death 
was changed to a vision of glory. Beautiful angelic spirits were present 
watching over her. Their faces were radiant with bliss, and their glittering 
robes were like transparent snow. I could feel them as material, and yet they 
communicated a sensation I can only describe by saying it seemed like com- 
pressed air. Some of these heavenly attendants stood at her head, and 
some at her feet, while others seemed to be hovering over her form. They 
did not appear with the wings of fowls, as angels are commonly painted, but 
they were in the perfected human form. They seemed so pure, so full of 
love, that it was sweet to look at them, as they watched the change now 
taking place in my mother. 

" I now turned my attention more directly to my mother, and saw the 
external senses leave her. First the power of sight departed, and then a 
veil seemed to drop over the eyes ; then the hearing ceased, and next the 
sense of feeling. The spirit began to leave the limbs, as they died first ; 
and the light that filled each part, in every fiber, drew up towards the chest. 
As fast as this took place, the veil seemed to drop over the part from whence 
spiritual life was removed. A ball of light was now gathering, just above 
her head ; and this continued to increase as long as the spirit was connected 
with the body. The light left the brain last ; and then the silver cord was 
loosed. The luminous appearance soon began to assume the human form ; 
and I could see my mother again ! But oh, how changed ! She was light 
and glorious — arrayed in robes of dazzling whiteness ; free from disease, 
pain, and death. She seemed to be welcomed by the attending spirits with 
the joy of a mother over the birth of a child. She paid no attention to me, 
or any earthly object, but joined her companions ; and they seemed to go 
through the air. I attempted to follow them, in the spirit, for I felt strongly 
attracted, and longed to go with my mother. I saw them ascend, till they 
seemed to pass through an open space, when a mist came over my sight, 
and I saw them no more. 

"I returned and soon awoke — but not to sorrow, as those who have no 
hope. This vision, far more beautiful than language can express, remains 
stamped upon my memory. It is an unfailing comfort to me in my be- 
reavement." 

As such facts and experiences gain in frequency, and call 
for thought and investigation, it is plain that no scientist or 
religious truth-seeker can he fully prepared for his work 
without a comprehensive study of magnetism, clairvoy- 
ance, and the facts of spirit-presence. Without such study 
even the ahlest and best seem to wander in a haze of doubt 
and uncertainty. To know the inner-life of man is to know 
his immortality and the inner-life of nature — the being of 



FACTS OP SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 77 

God ; and these are the real questions of our day. With 
this central truth of the dual being of man, we are strong 
against materialism ; and all manner of Liberal Christians 
and Free Religionists must learn it, or they drift out of 
sight like Goodwood. The coming religion demands its 
recognition. 

A great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, (1724- 
1804,) intuitively foresaw one of the great results of this 
knowledge and study of man's inner-life — the facts of 
spirit-intercourse. The prophet can hardly be laughed at, 
even by those who may try to make light of the fulfilment 
of his words. He wrote : 

"There will come a day when it will be demonstrated that the human 
soul throughout its terrestrial existence, lives in a communion, actual and 
indissoluble, with the immaterial natures of the world of spirits ; that this 
world acts upon our own, through influences and impressions, of which 
man has no consciousness to-day, but which he will recognize at some 
future time." 

Fichte and Zollner, in his own land, will say gladly to- 
day that these words are fulfilled. Immanuel Hermann 
Fichte, one of the first philosophical writers in Germany, 
has just passed away in his eight3*-fourth 3~ear. Some 
twenty years ago he was convinced of the reality of spirit- 
intercourse by facts developed through the mediumship of 
the late Baron Guldenstubbe, a cultivated scholar and a 
man of high integrity, and has left a pamphlet full of 
moral earnestness as well as of mental ability. /He says, 
4 'No one should keep silent," and holds spiritualism as the 
ratification of the belief in immortality by the evidence of 
psychical experiences. The phenomena through Henry Slade 
he speaks of as tested b} T Zollner, Fechner, Scheibner, and 
Von Weber, the celebrated Gottingen electrician, all among 
the first phj'sicists in Europe, under conditions " to pre- 
clude all imposture or prestidigitation." He anticipates 



78 THE INNER LIFE. 

the greatest possible benefit to the cause of religion and 
morality from the progress of spiritualism, and says : 

"The proof that the future state is a continuity of the present one, and 
to he affected hy all earthly experiences, and hy our fundamental sentiments 
and affections while here, whether pleasant or grievous, empowers us to 
meet the moral obligations of life, entirely abstracted from considerations 
of future reward or punishment. Here in earth-life we have it in our 
power to seize our future destination. Certainly is this a serious revelation 
at a time when mankind has long since become accustomed to displace their 
care for the future from their daily routine, as a consideration not affecting 
their interest." 

With the idea of a divine Mind as the inner-life of 
nature, and by the help of interior research, we shall see 
man as building and using for a time his bodily frame. As 
Edmund Spenser said, three centuries ago : 

"For of the soul the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make." 

We shall find that the spirit is not dependent on its 
earthly body for its continued being, but that its immor- 
tality is but the "survival of the fittest." The thought 
of supernal spaces and realms full of the wealth and glory 
of angelic human life, of the dear immortals seeing us, and 
of whom we may get glimpses in hours of open vision, or 
whose presence we may feel and know, and of the Infinite 
Presence, fills the soul with reverence and joy. Spirit- 
visitations may be rare, "angels' visits few and far be- 
tween," but these rich experiences lift and light up the 
whole being, and their memor} r lives and glows for long 
years. They are like sweet strains of music, brief because 
one could not bear them long and live in the body ; yet 
no earthly melody can so thrill the heart as these voices 
from the spirit-land. Heaven pity those who say such visi- 
tations cannot be ! 

The low condition in a future life of such as were slaves 



FACTS OF SPIEIT-PEESENCE. 79 

to crime and selfishness here is but justice ; their final 
reaching to a higher harmony is but that conquest of evil 
by good, that upward tendency which streams through all 
things as the Divine purpose. A future of action and 
growth gives strength such as the old and enervating con- 
ception of eternal and selfish praise cannot give. 

Our sense of justice, shocked by the inequalities and 
limitations of earthly life, is satisfied by the eternal com- 
pensations of an enlarging future, and our innate desire 
for growth goes out toward the infinite possibilities of 
spiritual culture. With the decay of the earthly form man 
most truly lives, clothed upon by an incorruptible body. 
Even now we are in the eternal life, not only surrounded 
by spirits clad in flesh, but walking daily in the invisible 
presence of the blessed immortals. The real presence of 
our translated friends is the assurance that the hunger of 
the heart is to be satisfied, and that human affection and 
sweet personal companionship are lasting realities. 

The immortality of man we can know ; for the voice of 
the soul is confirmed by the testimony of the senses. This 
knowledge has important practical bearing and influ- 
ence on our life here. In its light our daily path is more 
clear, our daily duty more imperative 3'et more beauti- 
ful, — full of new and larger significance and dignity, of 
new grace and hope. The air grows pure and magnetic, 
the sky bright, the horizon broadens as we go on ; and 
with the ripening of the interior being that should come 
with old age we but draw nearer to the Life Beyond and 
hear the voices from its borders, and so death comes as " a 
sweet and solemn Passover." % 

The Katha UpanisJiad, of Hindoo Sanscrit antiquity, 
says : ' ' The fathers too shalt thou behold ; the heroes who 
died in battle ; the saints and sages glorified, the pious, the 
bounteous, the kings of old." The Buddhists, Mrs. L. M. 



80 THE INNER LTFE. 

Childs tells us, do not say a man is dead, but, " His soul 
has emigrated." Everywhere is the thought of immortality. 
In all ages poets have sung of angel- visitants, and artists 
have made them live in forms of supernal beaut} 7 . Is this 
all idle fancy ? Has it no foundation in human experience 
and in the very being of man ? 

As the result of a finer culture and development of man's 
interior being, — 7ns real life, — these ideas and experiences 
enlarge. Of this method of self-culture, so valuable yet 
so slightly appreciated, S. B. Brittan admirably says : 

"We have yet to penetrate the inner mysteries of being. Then the 
faculties, by a kind of introversion, begin to open in a new direction. 

We look inward and reach centerward ; and at eveiy step the mind is 
intromitted to a new and more interior sphere of being. 

The shadows that float in the dim atmosphere of our earthly life, gradu- 
ally disappear; the translucent forms of a superior creation hover about us; 
and from the loftiest summits of this world we behold the immortal day- 
spring ! 

The grandest of all human discoveries is made when the senses are 
opened from within, and we are brought into conscious relations with the 
vast realm of the invisible and eternal. How does the spirit thrill with amaze- 
ment and ecstasy at the grandeur of the scene presented ; when the great 
veil that seemed to cover the world is suddenly drawn away, and we are 
made to realize that in the wide universe there is nothing concealed, that 
all doors are open to man ! Before the vision of the philosophical Seer 
everything is transparent as the luminous ether. He dwells in a region 
of ineffable light, and can know no darkness save the obscurity that depends 
upon moral conditions, or the existing state and relations of the soul. The 
solid earth becomes a crystal sphere; the rugged mountains stand out iu 
the clear air white as alabaster forms; and the fathomless depths arc dis- 
covered to be illuminated ways, where the spirit may dwell in light and 
walk alone with God. 

If we gradually enter upon the inner life, we at once begin to see those 
divine realities which before were only objects of faith and hope. The 
stormy passions of this rude world are hushed, and sweet peace soothes the 
unresting heart. The music of glad voices and the universal harmony are 
precious realities to our waking consciousness ; radiant forms people our 
day-dreams, or glide before us in ' visions of the night when deep sleep 
falleth on man.' Through rifts in the clouds of our mortal sphere we catch 
glimpses of happy faces, whose entrancing smiles are the attempered glories 
of God and his angels." 



FACTS OP SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 81 

Materialism cannot recognize the innate and discovering 
power of the soul. It limits our knowledge to what the 
outward senses can reach, in their crude and limited way. 
Our external senses are of priceless value, as means of 
knowing the outward beaut} 7 and grandeur around us and 
of verifying and confirming interior truths, but the materi- 
alistic thinker and the inductive scientist ignore a super- 
sensuous and interior realm, beyond their range yet closely 
linked to the outward world, and having subtile and power- 
ful influence upon our life. The higher class of scientists 
get glimpses of this vast realm, but they are drawn back by 
their inductive habits of thought and investigation, and — ■ 
with some honorable exceptions, fortunately increasing — 
keep to their imperfect and fragmentary methods, ignorant 
of inner realities. 

In a lecture in Boston, Tyndall spoke of the philosopher 
as working "with his eyes, hands, and senses," and "going 
beyond the region of the senses into a sort of under-world 
from which all phenomena grow," and using his " imagina- 
tion" (intuition) to form theories. Elsewhere he sa} 7 s : 
" Two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse 
in the eye the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the 
visual organ requisite for their translation into light does 
not exist." Huxley tells us that " the wonderful noon-day 
silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the 
dullness of our hearing. Could our ears but catch the 
murmur of the tiny maelstroms, as they whirl in the myri- 
ads of innumerable cells which constitute each tree, we 
should be stunned as with the roar of a great city." 

Dr. E. D, Babbitt of New York, in his book on " The 
Principles of Light and Color," tells of gx*ades of ether finer 
and finer, and of vibrations producing colors far finer than 
those of our visible spectrum. In sound and color the dull 
senses fail to appreciate the perfectness of all music and the 
6 



82 THE INNER LIFE. 

beaut}' of all subtly delicate hues. Science is carrying us to- 
ward the subtler realms. In London, Norman Lockyear talks 
of matter many times lighter than hydrogen ; and Prof. 
Crookes tells the Royal Society of ultra-gaseous matter in 
connection with electricity. Dr. Babbitt's researches point 
back of electricity to a dual unit}' — an element and a prin- 
ciple of motion together. Chavee, a French physicist, 
says, "No fact in plrysics, chemistry, or mechanics con- 
travenes the theor}- of an electro-luminous organism for 
man." He is a scientist and not a believer in the facts of 
spirit-presence, }*et his words solve and explain them, for 
millions of spiritual beings may thus walk the earth all 
unseen by our poor eyes. 

Mrs. Maria King, a gifted writer too little known, saj's, 
in her Principles of Nature, vol. i. p. 249 : 

" Clairvoyance is a gift vouchsafed to individuals of particular tempera- 
ments and constitutions, by means of which they may study the secrets 
of nature, may discover the action of the invisible elements, the life-forces : 
therefore men arc not left without the means of studying nature's most 
intricate methods. Are the discoveries of the astronomer, the chemist, 
of value to man ? not less so are those of the clairvoyant. Are the tele- 
scope and the microscope products of art and of nature combined ? So is well- 
directed, cultivated clairvoyance ; and if men prize the former, and avail 
themselves of discoveries made by their means, they should no less prize 
the other and avail themselves of discoveries made by its means. Man has 
no more right to deny the discoveries made through clairvoyance than 
those made through the telescope or microscope, it ranking with these as a 
product of natural law, and therefore its discoveries not possible to be set 
aside. Man cannot truthfully say, ' We have no means of testing the 
truth of principles, of propositions relative to the action of nature's invisible 
agents.' They may trust the revelations of the clairvoyant as well as those 
of the telescope, which latter they do not pretend to deny from want of 
personal observation. 

The educated clairvoyant may behold in the beams of the morning sun 
the grades of the electric fluid [or ethers] and their action upon eacli 
other ; also the effect of that action. He can behold atmospheric atoms 
eliminating light, and he may behold that the effect of the rapidity of this 
action is the effect of heat ; therefore he unavoidably arrives at the con. 
elusion that chemical action of atoms of light produces an effect, which is 



FACTS OF SPTRIT-PRESENCE. 83 

heat. Thus as he observes — as he perfects his clairvoyant sight by prac- 
tice, by art — he may discover the most intricate processes of nature-, and 
arrive at just conclusions concerning the methods and the results of these 
processes by the use of his reasoning faculties." 

Carry tliis research into the being of man, and clairvoy- 
ance reveals to us the interior and spiritual senses, — like 
our external senses, but finer and reaching further, — and 
we are thrilled and startled by a new conviction, a proof 
positive that man's spiritual organization is an entity not 
dependent on his bodily form. 

"When I saw a young and sincere girl lying on her sick- 
bed with her e3'es closed, and her mother with a skilled and 
eminent physician standing by, and heard her describe the 
occupation of the family and arrangement of the furniture 
in a house seven hundred miles distant, — which none knew 
but which was found correct, yet contrary to the mother's 
latest knowledge and to her expectation and idea, — the 
external senses could not take in that fact, the measuring 
wand of the materialist could not span it. 

Dr. J. R. Buchanan, in an admirable address in Brook- 
lyn, in December, 1879, says : 

" The doctrine of the invalidity of human testimony, as presented by the 
skeptical philosopher Hume, was an ingenious sophism, which might even 
captivate good men ; but the doctrine of its entire worthlessness, presented 
now in certain medical journals [in relation to the Miss Fancher case] , is as 
far below the skepticism of Hume as the assassin is below the honorable sol- 
dier. Establish this animal skepticism, which destroys all faith in human 
testimony, and you paralyze progress, and establish the permanent martyr- 
dom of original genius. To deny that the human soul is capable, when suf- 
ficiently released from its material bonds, of witnessing facts occurring at a 
distance, simply shows the ignorance of the denier. Dogmatism naturally 
runs into delusion, and refuses to be undeceived. This sort of chronic 
skepticism affects the mind, as chronic rheumatism does the body, making 
the joints so stiff that they cannot be moved. In its effect it is as ruinous 
as paralysis. What excuse can there be to-day for any intelligent man to 
deny the transcorporeal power of the human soul, unless it be the same 
excuse as for the colored brother Jasper denying the rotundity of the earth ? 
Whatever man has done is a possibility, and depends on a power in the 



84 THE INKER LIFE. 

human constitution which some men possess in a high degree, but which all 
men possess in some degree, and will be realized when the human race i3 
adequately developed. Not one man in millions can shoot a flying ball like 
Dr. Carver or Bogardus, but that does not diminish its credibility. The phe- 
nomenon of transcorporeal vision is much more common than that of shoot- 
ing flying balls." 

He gives a few well-known cases " out of man}'' thou- 
sand," and I transcribe his narration of Swedenborg's 
clairvoyant vision, which no materialist can bring within 
the range of his sensuous and limited philosophy or no- 
philosophy rather. 

" In 1756 Swedenborg was at Gottenburg, at the house of William Castel, 
three hundred miles from Stockholm. It was on Saturday evening, when 
a great fire broke out in Stockholm, which he saw and described in its 
progress and extent during the time it was burning. Next morning he de- 
scribed it again to the Governor, and on Tuesday the royal courier brought 
the full confirmation of his statement. For this we have, in addition to 
other testimony, the statement of the eminent philosopher, Kant. Sweden- 
borg watched the progress of the fire as if he had been on the ground, and 
was yery much excited. He saw that a friend's house was burned down, 
and his own was in danger, but at eight o'clock he exclaimed, ' God be 
praised, the fire is extinguished the third door from my very house ! ' — all of 
which was strictly true." 

Either "transcorporeal vision" (that is clairvoyance) , or 
some direct angel- visitation, must solve this fact. The high 
possibilities of the great Swedish seer are in other men 
waiting for development and fit conditions. 

This study of the inner life opens new proofs of subtile and 
far-reaching influences and delicate susceptibilities. Some 
thirty years ago I wrote a letter, from my then home at 
Rochester, New York, to Dr. Buchanan, then leading Pro- 
fessor in the Eclectic Medical College at Cincinnati. We 
were total strangers, and I wrote to enclose a subscription 
for his Journal of Man, and added some words of com- 
mendation of his labors, expecting no reply. An answer 
soon came from him, saying, that he felt like submitting 
my letter to the psychometric examination of a young man 



FACTS OF SPERIT-PEESBNCE. 85 

who had this fine susceptibility ; that this person simply 
took the letter, with no knowledge of its contents, held it 
against his forehead, sat quietly until some impression came 
to him, and then described my character from the impres- 
sion gained from my handwriting ; doing all this in his 
normal state, and in Dr. Buchanan's presence. The de- 
scription was held correct, in most respects, by my friends, 
and more correct by me, — showing a subtile comprehension 
of leading traits and qualities, remarkable indeed. All this 
from the delicate yet lasting transmission of some part of 
my mental and spiritual influence on to the paper, and his 
power to feel and describe me by contact with what I had 
written. This is but one of many such tests by persons 
and psychometrists far apart. Professor Mendenhall, a phy- 
sician of high repute in Cincinnati, said a few j'ears ago, 
as quoted by Dr. Samuel Underbill, of Ohio, "The whole 
field of nervous diseases is a perfect wilderness to M.D.'s, 
who have not the light of clairvoyance." 

Dr. Underbill writes of a clairvoyant, whom he employed 
as a help in his practice, telling a man of his white horse 
kicking up his heels in the yard ; on which the reply was, 
" That is not true, for the horse is tied in the stable." At 
once a messenger was sent, and the horse, to its owner's 
surprise, was found in the yard. The clairvoj'ant had been 
told to go and look at the black horse, but answered, " Your 
black horse is white." This is a quaint and honiely illustra- 
tion of the same faculty. 

Dr. J. Kerner, of Germany, as quoted by Underbill, tells 
of a Frenchman in Paris who dreamed he saw his son, who 
stretched out his arms and said, "Father, I die!" The 
son was in New Orleans, and the father, strongly impressed 
by his dream, went across the ocean at once, found his 
son's boarding-place in New Orleans, and learned that he 
died the day and hour of that vivid dream. His last words, 
uttered with outstretched arms, were, "Father, I die ! " 



86 THE INNEE, LIFE. 

Was this clairvoyance? Could the son's intense out- 
reaching of his soul for a distant father's love make its 
mark on that father's inner-sense ? Was it the son's spirit, 
going to the father with that last word ? What answer has 
materialism to such facts ! What has inductive science to 
say? "Impossible; they never occurred; hallucination; 
unconscious cerebration ; mental prepossession ; only experts 
can judge, and I am the expert." All these are but varied 
expressions of the same old bigotry, of the blindness and 
impudence of pedant and priest in all ages. 

In Johnson's New Cyclopaedia is a fine definition of clair- 
voj'ance, which may help us : 

" Clairvoyance, from the French clair, 'clear,' and voir, to 'see.' It is a 
supersensuous perception, depending on the spiritual nature of man, without 
which it would be impossible. The world of spirit, to which 'force' 
furnishes the key, perhaps may at some future time broaden into as wide a 

field as the plvysical world now presents The interference of a 

second person is not essential, and perhaps without exception distorts the 
result 

Swedenborg, Zschokke, and Davis are not peculiarities of modern times, 
but are repetitions of Socrates, Apollonius, and countless other sages, who 

deeply impressed their personality on their times Clairvoyance must 

be regarded as a peculiar state of the mind, in which it is in a greater or 
lesser degree independent of the physical body. It presents many grada- 
tions Hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, as well as seeing, are 

seemingly independent of the physical organs The perceptions be- 
come intensified The mind sees without physical organs of vision, 

hears without organs of hearing, and feeling becomes a refined conscious- 
ness which brings it en rapport with the intelligence of the world 

If, as there is every reason to believe, clairvoyance depends on the unfolding 
of the spirit's perceptions, then the extent of that unfolding marks its per- 
fection Yet there is a profound condition which sets aside all these, 

and the mind appears divested of all physical trammels, and to come in 
direct contact with the thought-atmosphere of the world. Time and space 
have no existence, and matter becomes transparent. If there is an indepen- 
dent spiritual existence after the death of the physical body, the clairvoyant 
in this independent stage closely approximates to that existence. Clairvoy- 
ance is no miraculous power, but an inherent faculty, a foregleam in this 
life of the next spiritual life. For if man exists as a spirit after the dissolu- 
tion of the physical body, his present life is that of a spirit clad in flesh, and 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 87 

should manifest some of the characteristics of the next untrammeled con- 
dition." 

It is sometimes said that clairvoyance is impossible, .save 
when some one knows what it is to be seen, showing it to 
be a sort of mind-reading. 

Allen Putnam, a careful and competent observer, in his 
work on Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c, says : 

"Twelve years ago, or more, I saw a young man mesmerized, and the 
operator put me in communication with him. I held my watch over the top 
of his head and near to it, out of the range of his eye-sight, changing the 
position of the hands, yet he told me the exact time, as the hands stood. I 
turned them so as not to know how they stood, yet he told accurately, 
being blindfolded all the time." 

His own description of one of his first clairvoyant visions, 
by Andrew Jackson Davis, carries us at once to that 
"underworld from which all phenomena grow," of which 
Tyndall caught a glimpse and then drew back. He says : 

"In my ordinary state I had never seen an organ of the human viscera; 
but now I could see all organs and their functions. The whole body seemed 
transparent as glass! It was invested with a rich spiritual beauty. It 
looked illuminated like a city. Each organ had centers of light, besides 
being enveloped by a general sphere. For example, I saw the heart, sur- 
rounded by one combination of living colors, with special points of illumina- 
tion interspersed. The auricles and ventricles gave out distinct flames of 
light, and the pericardium was a garment of magnetic fire, surrounding and 
protecting the heart in the discharge of its functions. The air-chambers 
seemed like so many chemical laboratories. The fire in them wrought 
instantaneous chemical changes in the blood; and the great sympathetic 
neiwe, whose roots extend through the lower viscera, and whose topmost 
branches are lost in the superior strata of the sensorium, appeared like a 
column of life, interwoven and blended with a soft and silvery fire ! 

The brain was likewise luminous with prismatic colors I saw each 

ligament, and tendon, and membranous structure illuminated with sheets 
and centers of magnetic light, which indicated and beautifully set forth the 

presence of the spiritual principle The spirit of Nature and my spirit 

seemed to have formed a sympathetic acquaintance, — the foundation of a 
high and eternal communion ! The properties and essences of plants were 
distinctly visible. Every fiber of the wild-flower, or atom of the mountain 
violet, was radiant with its own peculiar life. I saw the living elements and 



88 THE COSTER LIFE. 

essences flow and play through these simple forms of matter ; and in the 
same manner I saw the many trees of forests and fields all filled with life 

and vitality of different hues and degrees of refinement Beds of 

zinc, copper, limestone, gold, &c, arrested my attention, and each gave off 
diverse kinds of luminous atmospheres. Everything had a glory of its 
own ! The salts in the seas sparkled like living gems ; crystalline bodies 
emitted soft, brilliant, azure and crimson emanations ; sea-plants extended 
their broad arms, filled with hydrogenous life, and embraced the joy of ex- 
istence." 

His statement, ten years ago, of his personal habits, tells 
of the purity and serene self-poise necessary for these 
experiences. Like habits, and the transparent integrity 
and self-control they indicate, are necessary too for the 
highest spiritual mediumship, and to lift our common life 
up to a higher realm of interior perception, of spiritual as 
well as plrysical health. 

"And now a word concerning my habits with reference to these things; 
for my physical methods, I think, have a direct and important bearing upon 
the question. Whenever I wish to obtain these visional results by voluntary 
telescopic clairvoyance, I do not seek opium, or hasheesh ; neither Arabian, 
Hebrew, Bohemian, nor Gipsey incantations ; nor do I clog my digestive 
organs, nor highly stimulate my nerves ; but there comes (as Daniel ex- 
presses it) a period of ' fasting,' and of constant, though not over-urgent 
desire. Sometimes I have been obliged to continue this from four to six 
weeks, before my nerve-system was perfectly still, my blood cool, my senses 
indifferent to the outer world. Then I could concentrate the perceptive 
faculties, and bring into action all the requisite organs, and, under the con- 
trol of intuition, direct them upon remote earthly objects, or scenes super- 
terrestrial. If I had taken for food what is called a 'generous diet,' or 
habitually engaged in these mental exercises at night, I should in either 
case have distrusted my discoveries. But I almost never have such an ex- 
perience as a dream. 

I never attempt to get visions in the night, ' when deep sleep falleth upon 
men.' My exercises, on the contrary, are between six o'clock in tbe morn- 
ing and twelve o'clock of the same day. If I do not obtain my clairvoyant or 
other experiences during these hours, they do not come that day ; for I do 

not then seek them This has been my mental and clairvoyant habits 

for years I have met persons who said to me, ' Why, Mr. Davis, are 

you not all the time conscious of the presence of the spiritual world ?' And 
my answer has been, ' No, I could not be and live.' Others have asked, 
' Are you not personally and frequently in contact with spiritual beings ? ' 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 89 

And I have replied, ' No, I could not be frequently in contact, and yet keep 
physically healthy, and be mentally able to attend to the ordinary duties of 
my life.' And again, some ask, 'Are you not constantly and consciously 
associated with ideas, aud thinking of great principles ? ' And others seem 
to think that I should appear uniformly abstract, and look ghostly, like the 
remains of an evangelical minister." 

Magnetism indicates the independence of the spiritual 
organization ; and its facts, and those of psychometry, show 
the sway and power of the spiritual forces. All conspires 
to make the survival of our personality after the death of 
the physical bocty a natural fact. We are ready for still 
more light, and the great facts of spirit-manifestation and 
communion come to us. Do we overrate their importance ? 
Professor Butlerof, the Russian physicist, of the University 
of St. Petersburg, says : 

"The recognition of their reality will very soon be the inevitable duty of 
every honorable observer, and finally, of all humanity. This recognition 
will destroy many of the present prevailing views ; life and science will 
have to come to terms with it. Our old notions about the essential nature 
of matter dissolve in the light of the actuality of these facts, and new 
ideas present themselves of the endless variety of degrees and forms of 
existence." 

A remarkable article on " Theism," in the Westminster 
Review, speaks of Spiritualism as "the religion of the 
future," and says : 

" It is in our midst to-day, with signs and wonders uprising like a swollen 
tide, and scorning the barriers of nature's laws. It comes veiling its des- 
tined splendors beneath an exterior that invites contempt. Hidden from 
the prudent, its truths are revealed to babes. Once more the weak will con- 
found the mighty, the foolish the wise Spiritualism will re-establish, 

on what professes to be ground of positive evidence, the fading belief in a 
future life — not such a future as is dear to the reigning theology, but a 
future developed from the present, a continuation under improved condi- 
tions of the scheme of things around us." 

The Scientific American, not accepting its facts, is yet so 
impressed by them as to declare : 

" If it were true, it would mark the nineteenth century with imperishable 



90 THE INNER LIFE. 

lustre; if it were true, we can find no words to adequately express our 
sense of its importance ; if it were true, such words as profound, vast, stu- 
pendous, would have to be strengthened a hundred-fold to be fitted for such 
a case ; if it were true, its discoverer would have no rival in renown." 

Millions can leave out the qualifying "if" and say that 
the rest is no overstatement. The undying hopes and 
longings that grow with the growth of humanity have found 
a higher satisfaction and stronger outward proof than ever 
before. A great truth of the. soul, a sublime and uplifting 
intuition, an aspiration that spans the ages, has been tested 
through the senses, and "confirmation strong as Holy 
Writ " is the glad and great result. Fraud may be spoksn 
of; and especially will pious (or rather impious) bigots 
raise the cry. It comes with but poor grace from those 
whose dogmas come down to them from those Dark Ages, 
when, as Mosheim tells us, pious frauds so abounded that 
it was held justifiable to lie for the good of the church. A 
margin of fraud is granted ; for where the genuine is there 
is its counterfeit, a useful stimulant to careful and needed 
scrutiny. But it is of small moment in the balance of 
proof, for we have, on the other side, such a weight of evi- 
dence as can hardly be equalled in any department of sci- 
ence, proving the reality of the life beyond and the return 
of the denizens of that great world to our narrow earth ! 
The one is but the dust floating in the sunlight, compared 
to the glory of the light in which it floats, and by its slight 
obstruction all the more fully reveals. 

Solid matter can be made to pass into the invisible realm. 
The black and grimy gunpowder, under the fiery touch of 
the lighted torch, flashes into smoke and floats away to 
mingle unseen with the impalpable ether. From these 
earthly bodies of ours the chemistry of death evolves 
some subtile matter, with form, and power, and conscious 
personality — ' ' the incorruptible body " fit for the finer 



FACTS OF SPLRIT-PEESENCE. 91 

conditions of a higher life. From the invisible comes 
the visible. The wand of the chemist, moving among his 
retorts, evokes the salts from impalpable gases. So the 
spiritual body may be made visible, or its will can guide 
the force that manifests itself in beautiful phenomena. 
The law is everywhere. What dogma of priest or scientist 
shall set the limits of spiritual chemistry ? 

On this matter of imperfect, or fraudulent, alleged spirit- 
communications, I quote some wise and timely words : 

" Persons who have given but brief reflection to the problems that come 
up in Spiritualism, as in eveiy other form of life, often put the question : 
' Why are not all spiritual manifestations of a lofty order ? Why are friv- 
olous, deceptive spirits allowed to manifest themselves ? Why is there so 
little moral earnestness in many ? ' 

We shall not have to go far for an answer, since it rests in the nature of 
things. It is this : Probably one of the important providential purposes of 
this sudden outbreak of wide-spread intercommunication with the Spirit- 
world, is to let us know that the change from an earthly to a spiritual state 
and abode does not involve a change of a man's individuality. The realm 
he is to inhabit in spirit-life is that spiritual environment he is creating for 
himself here by his daily thoughts, habits, desires, deeds, passions, loves, 
aspirations, and tastes. 

Unless the kingdom of God is within us, unless it has come before we 
leave this life, we shall get no nearer to it by entering the invisible world. 
Already we are in that world, just as much as a blind man is in a world of 
sight. Not by submission to a creed ; not by going through certain rites 
and forms ; not by any vicarious agency or virtue, will that kingdom of life 
and light and love be found. All these external means, processes, forms, 
can avail only so far as they may affect a man's character for good ; so that 
his depravity shall become rectitude, his impurity purity, his selfishness 
generosity, his meanness nobleness, his hatred love, and his malice charity. 
And oh, do not imagine that by any vicarious action, and without effort of 
your own, your character is to be changed from the bestial to the celestial. 

Yes, the communications, supposed to come from spirits, are often friv- 
olous and unworthy. Those to which great names are attached are often 
ridiculously false, since the matter of them is inferior to what we know the 
credited writers were capable of on earth. This only shows that there are 
deceptive, immature, undeveloped spirits, who find themselves morally and 
intellectually, just where they were when they left the physical body. Or 
it may show that the medium himself gets impressions psychometrically, 
which he attributes ignorantly to spirits once famous on earth. 



92 THE INNER LIFE. 

By the mere circumstances of passing into the spirit-world, man will 
not at once make amends for all his past neglects, impurities, depravities. 
The sinner will not rise at or.ce into the saint, nor the fool into the sage. 
We shall not gain vicariously those good things of the mind and heart, 
which we spurned when they were offered to us here. There is no royal 
road to perfection even in the spirit-world. Eternity is before us, and God 
is very patient. 

If the disclosures from the unseen world were all of the most exalted 
character, they would afford us no true idea of the numerous grades of 
moral and mental development existing there. Spirits create their own 
environments ; carry their own heaven, or their own hell. It becomes ex- 
ternalized and is their home, the home of their preference, until, aspiring 
to something better, and courting high influences, and looking to God for 
light, they gradually rise to a state less unworthy of the yearnings of an 
immortal being. 

And by presenting this wonderful fact; by showing us deceased men 
and women with their mortal foibles and shortcomings still adhering to 
them, their moral and mental conditions hardly yet changed for the better, 
Spiritualism is fast uprooting a mischievous error from the minds and con- 
sciences of men. For spirits come to us now, revealing and enforcing that 
divine caution, that eternal verity : " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked ; 
for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." — Devotional Spirit- 
ualism, 

This skeptic saj-s, in regard to the alleged facts of 
spirit-presence or clairvoyance: "All this may be true, 
to you, but I cannot accept what I know nothing about. 
I have never felt or witnessed such things." How many 
of us know anything, personally, of the experiments of 
natural scientists ? A few great men, with their fine ap- 
paratus and laboratories, make the experiments by which 
they test their theories of light, heat, electricity, &c, and 
we accept their statements and conclusions. Why refuse 
all credence to the experiments and experiences, all belief 
of the testimony and conclusions of the cloud of intelli- 
gent and careful witnesses of these facts ? A reasonable 
skepticism is wise, and we must prove all things as best we 
can ; but this unhesitating acceptance, both of the testi- 
mony and the conclusions of so-called " scientific" investi- 
gators, and this obstinate refusal of the testimony and con- 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 93 

elusions of competent investigators (some of them most 
eminent scientists) of these facts, are in absurd and irra- 
tional contrast. Poor and narrow-minded creatures indeed 
should we he, if we limited our belief or theory of things 
to what we have seen or touched ! The world grows rich 
by a reasonable acceptance of the testimony and ideas of 
its true and gifted men and women, and we want no high- 
priests, either of science or theology, to cry out against 
such acceptance. 

Would any one limit these facts to a few raps and 
trances ? These are full of significance ; but widely varied 
manifestations reach from power, surprising and startling 
the uncultivated, to transcendent intelligence teaching and 
inspiring the wise, — all needed and valued tests of spirit- 
identity and presence, coming in fit time to meet and van- 
quish the materialistic tendencies of our time, and to con- 
found " the pride of science." The great spiritual move- 
ment, with its facts, awakening thought, and quickening 
intuition, its science and philosophy, its religious element, 
sweeter and nobler than the poor supernaturalism of the 
sects, is a proof and result of the progressive development 
of man. Its full power and meaning we fail to see. " Un- 
der its sway what breadth to the idea of man's being and 
destiny ! Far back, when the first life stirred on this planet, 
its seers and teachers find that the forces of nature worked 
in one direction, toward the evolution of man, not merely 
as a plrysical being, but as an heir of immortality. This 
carries us into an illimitable future, not of dread despair or 
the monotonj^ of eternal and changeless adoration, but of 
celestial usefulness, and growth in wisdom and harmony. 
Of that future we get such glimpses that we know our 
friends still live, and know us and love us, and can some- 
times even come to us. 

The splendid researches of Darwin and other inductive 



94 THE INKER LIFE. 

scientists, give us evolution in the realm of matter. In 
spiritual science the same idea is traced up to man and on 
to an eternity of progressive development. 
Andrew Jackson Davis says : 

" A child is the repository of infinite possibilities. In its baby constitu- 
tion we recognize the holy plans of Divine Goodness, the immortal impar- 
tations of Divine Wisdom, the image and likeness of the Supreme Spirit, 
the possibilities of the greatest manhood, womanhood, and angelhood. . . . 
The philosophy of death is the philosophy of change ; not of change in the 
personality of the individual, but in the situation of the human spiritual 
principle ; which, instead of being situated in an earthly body, is placed in 
a spiritual organization Death causes as much alteration in the con- 
dition of the individual as the bursting of the rose-bud causes in the situa- 
tion and condition of the flower. It is only an event, a circumstance in our 
eternal life." 

At a dinner-party in Paris, in the presence of several 
materialists and atheists, who made up part of a brilliant 
company, Victor Hugo spoke, his features lighting up 
with enthusiasm : 

" I feel in myself the future life. I am like a forest which has more than 
once been cut down. The new shoots are stronger and livelier than ever. 
I am rising, I know, toward the sky. The sunshine is on my head. The 
earth gives me its generous sap, but heaven lights me with the reflection of 
unknown worlds. You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily 
powers. Why, then, is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers 
begin to fail ? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart. 
There I breathe, at this hour, the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the 
roses, as at twenty years old. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer 
I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. 
It is marvelous, yet simple. It is a fairy-tale, and yet it is history. For 
half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse, history, 
philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried 
all. But I feel that I have not said the thousandth part of what is in me. 
When I go down to the grave I can say, like so many others, 'I have 
finished my day's work;' but I cannot say, 'I have finished my life.' My 
day's work will begin again next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley ; 
it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight to open with the dawn." 

The great Frenchman's life has been illumined by the 
light of the spiritual movement. He knows and appre- 
ciates its facts, and is inspired by its ideas. 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PEESENCE. 95 

It is individual life hereafter and personal recognition 
that we long for. In his noble and touching poem, In 
Memoriam, sacred to his friend Hallam, Tennyson says : 

" Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside, 
And I shall know Mm ivhen we*meet." 

The true poet is always a spiritual philosopher. I can 
respond to his words with the added assurance of outward 
knowledge, for a dear friend, from the spirit- world, I have 
been allowed to see, — his form the same that he wore on 
earth, tinged perhaps with some radiance from his higher 
life. Other kindred experiences come fresh to my mind. 

Years ago I met George Redman, a total stranger, in a 
city distant from my home. As I stepped into his room 
he looked up and said : "I saw a spirit-form come in with 
you," and described my mother as perfectly as I could have 
done. I sat down opposite him at a table, giving no sign 
or response as to his description, and he took a sheet of 
paper and wrote, rapidly, a message of motherly affection, 
with correct allusions to family incidents, and signed her 
name. I still made no sign of response or denial, and 
messages, characteristic in thought and style, and marked 
by like private and family allusions, came with the signa- 
tures of my father and sister. Some of these, too, were 
written, each line from right to left, or backward. 

I once told a friend of a spirit- artist, and he mailed a 
letter three hundred miles, to a stranger, asking for a por- 
trait of a son, whose age and time of departure he gave. 
Months after, at their home, his wife showed me the por- 
trait, sent them by mail, a month after they wrote, and 
which was recognized by others of the famiby, who knew 
not how or whence it came, or that it had been sent for. 
There was no other portrait, and never had been. A 
daughter, twelve years old, a natural seer or clairvoyant, 



96 THE INNER LIFE. 

had told her mother, months before, of seeing a boy at her 
bedroom door, and described this brother who passed away 
before she was born. When this picture came, and the 
family were looking at it, this guileless child came in, 
looked over her mother's shoulder, and said, thoughtfully, 
" Mamma, that is the boy I saw at my door." 

There came also to them a fine likeness, both in pencil, 
half life-size, of another son, whose portrait they had not 
asked for nor sent his name. 

"Judge Edmonds was the warm personal friend of Isaac T. Hopper. 
This good Quaker finally became ill ; and it was evident that his useful 
pilgrimage was ending. The Judge, naturally social, frequently visited 
him. Calling on a Thursday about four o'clock, he found the invalid friend 
very weak and low. He thought, however, he might rally and survive 
several days, possibly months. This was the evening for the Judge to hold 
his weekly seance. The party assembled at eight o'clock. All seated, and 
the seance opened in an orderly manner, a member of the Judge's family 
became influenced, and it was written with considerable rapidity, ' I am in 
the spirit-ivorld,' and signed I. T. H. Who is that ? was the passing inquiry. 

None seemed to know, until the Judge, adjusting his glasses and looking 
closely, exclaimed, ' These are the initials of Isaac T. Hopper, but it can 
hardly be possible, for I left his residence a few hours since ; he was very 
feeble, yet comfortable.' 

Judge Edmonds, throwing on his hat and cloak, and repairing to the 
residence of his Quaker friend, found the body a corpse and the friends 
weeping. Returning, after a little time, to the circle he had left, the 
medium's hand was again controlled, writing the following : 'lam in the 
spirit-world, and I now understand what the apostle meant when he said : 
" We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye." I have not slept. I have not been unconscious for a mo- 
ment ; but I have been changed. I have changed the earthly for the spirit- 
ual body. I was met by those whom I knew and loved. I. T. Hopper.' 

In the 'Revue Phil, et Relic/.,' of May, 1856, A. A. Mountersely said : 
' When a table, moving under the hands of four persons, myself included, 
in answer to a question of mine, announces to me beforehand the exact 
number of words and letters that the answer, often a long one, will con- 
tain, and without a mistake as to either, is it my reason that does this ? If 
so, let an academician try it. 

When it spells out an answer in numerous verses, beginning with the 
last letter of the last word of the last verse, and continuing thus backwards 
to the first letter of the strophe, is it my reason that does this ? If so, let 
an academician try it. 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 97 

When I ask the reasoning being created in my table to extract five cube 
roots of quantities occupying eigbt places of figures, and tbe answer is 
given me in three minutes, while I require two hours, with the help of a 
table of logarithms, to verify the result of the calculation, is it my reason, 
that does this ? If so, let an academician try it." 

Possibly some may say that these wondrous facts come 
of some mesmeric rapport or mind-reading. This case of 
Judge Echnonds and Isaac T. Hopper could hardly be 
solved in that way. Even if it can, careful investigation 
will show, what I have found, personal intelligence distinct 
from that of any one present, cognizing facts of which no 
one had knowledge, and which were contrary to their views 
and thoughts. 

In December, 1878, I visited Mrs. Simpson, a medium 
in Chicago, a Frenchwoman from New Orleans, whom I 
only met once, the night before, a few moments in a large 
company, and who had no outward means of knowiug my 
family or relatives. She held a slate under a small table, 
without drawers or moulding, by placing her open hand 
under the slate, and so pressing it up against the lower side 
of the table, her other hand in full sight, and a small bit 
of pencil on the slate, — all in full da3dight, and I sitting 
by her side. Sometimes I held the slate under the table, 
in the same way, she touching the end which projected out, 
so that both her hands were in my sight, yet I heard the 
pencil move over the slate, and the messages came all the 
same as when she held it, yet not so forcibly or rapidly. 

My uncle, Calvin Stebbins, of Wilbraham, Mass., who 
passed away several years since, had his name given and 
characteristic messages written out on the slate. One of 
these was: "He thought, when on earth, that spirits went 
but did not come again." I did not know his views, but 
supposed him to have been, a spiritualist, knowing he had 
paid some attention to the subject. The next week I saw 
his widow, in Detroit, who said that he was not convinced 
7 



98 THE INNER LIFE. 

of spirit-intercourse, but bad a firm faith in immortality. 
She had never been in Chicago, he had never seen the west, 
she spends most of her time in New England, and the 
message touching bis views was correct, yet contrary to my 
thought and expectation. How could my mind have in- 
fluenced it? One of these written messages was strik- 
ingly characteristic, full of the vigor and clearness of my 
departed kinsman: "I find no hell or baby's skulls, as we 
used to talk of. I find over here common sense and justice. 
Each man makes his own destiny. God has not destined 
any one to heaven or hell. Ah ! Giles, the abj'ss is 
bridged, and we are fortifying the arches under the bridge, 
daily, daily." 

Mrs. Murdock, then Mrs. Blair, years ago, painted (blind- 
folded) a flower-piece for a friend of mine in this State, 
each flower t} T pical of a member of his family, here or in 
the higher life. One pale rose, with a broken stem, she 
said, was for a grandson in Kansas, who was then ill, and 
would soon pass away. They supposed the child to be 
well, but heard, the next week, of his death soon after the 
pale rose was painted by this susceptible medium. 

A highly intelligent woman, of Quaker birth, near this 
city, whom I know well, told me how she heard raps under 
her pillow years ago, — three soft and distinctly different 
sounds. She woke her husband, both heard them, and she 
said, " My grandchildren are sick, and I fear are dying." 
Three nights they both heard these raps, and then came a 
letter telling of the sudden death of the three grandchil- 
dren the night and hour they were first heard. After this 
they ceased. 

I extract from a letter in The Banner of Light, from 
Hon. R. S. McCormick, of Franklin, Pa., giving his report 
of a visit to Mrs. Mary Andrews, at Cascade, near Mo- 
ravia, N. Y. : 



FACTS OP SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 99 

" The stance was held in the morning, with five or more persons besides 
Mrs. Andrews (the medium), and conducted in the usual way. A dark 
seance preceded the light one, during which a voice near me, purporting to 
be my mother, said, ' Robert, when you return home, go and see Jane as 
soon as you can, and comfort her in her dark hours of solitude and gloom.' 
Jane Kerr, my only sister, resides in Pittsburgh, Pa., and is the widow of 
the late Colonel James K. Kerr, brother of Speaker Kerr, deceased, of the 
House of Representatives at Washington. My home is in Franklin, more 
than a hundred miles from Pittsburgh, and both places more than three 
hundred miles from Cascade. I went alone to Cascade, and there was no 
one there residing near us. I attended another seance the next morning, 
beginning at about nine A. M. In the dark room a voice, purporting to be 
my brother, who passed to spirit-life twelve years ago, said : ' Robert, Mr. 
Kerr has opened the door, and is weighing his investigations in the great 
ocean of eternity.' The nine p. m. train brought a message : ' Franklin, 
Pa., February 25, 1S76. Colonel Kerr died to-day. Funeral at two p. m., 
Monday.' Next morning, before leaving for Pittsburgh, I attended another 
seance, asked the time that Mr. Kerr expired, but had no response. Im- 
mediately before going to the cars (which stop near the door), Mrs. Andrews 
said to me, ' I think you will find that Mr. Kerr passed away between three 
and four A. m.' Arriving at his home, I found he died at twenty minutes 
to four A. M. 

Will those who speak so lightly of spirit-communications explain, or 
account for, this information I received in central New York ? On the day 
before Colonel Kerr's death I was told it would occur before my return 
home, on the next morning that it had transpired, and through Mrs. An- 
drews, the time of day it took place." 

In August, 1878, on a lovely Sunday afternoon, I was at 
Onset Baj T , at the cottage of Dr. H. H. Brigham, of Fitch- 
burg, Mass. The camp-meeting services of the clay were 
over, and we were looking out on the blue water and the 
green islands, enjoying the scenery, and inspired by the 
sweet, clear sea-air. He and his intelligent wife told me 
of one of their earby experiences — such as compelled them 
to be Spiritualists, if they would be true to themselves, as 
they well said. This occurred at their Fitchburg home 
twenty-eight years ago, while they were not believers, but 
investigators. Mrs. M. A. Billings (the medium), her hus- 
band, Dr. Brigham and wife, had just closed a seance, and 
were sitting away from the table, which moved, with no 



100 THE INNER LIEE. 

one touching it, in a way that seemed to indicate that there 
was something more for them, in addition to messages al- 
ready received by raps and moving of the table. He sat 
nearest the table, but did not touch it. All the rest were 
six feet from it, and with no touch of any person, raps 
came on it, and the message was spelled out by alphabet, 
and written down: "I died Saturday night, and my body 
has been carried through this place to-day for interment at 
Mount Auburn to-morrow. Eliza Liscomb." 

Mrs. Liscomb resided at Brattleboro, some fifty miles 
away, and they supposed her to be well. Dr. B. asked, in 
surprise, "You are not dead?" and the answer came, in 
the same way : " No ; I have passed through the beautiful 
change you call death, and little understand, and am more 
alive than ever." This was Monday night, and they wrote 
Mr. Liscomb the next morning, and learned that his wife 
passed away Saturday night, and her body was sent through 
Fitchburg on the cars Monday, for burial near Boston, at 
Mount Auburn Cemetery. Only these four were in the 
room when this message came, and had no outward means 
of knowing anything about it, yet it was true, and its 
minute veracity is evidence that it did come, as it pur- 
ported, from their valued friend. 

Well may Alfred E. Wallace say, in London, of spirit- 
manifestation : 

" It demonstrates mind without brain, and intelligence disconnected from 

a material body It furnishes the proof of a future life which so 

many crave, and for want of which so many live and die in anxious doubt, 
so many in positive disbelief." 

Of course we are to investigate with open and receptive 
minds, yet with thoughtful care, and with due use of reason 
and conscience. We are to " try the spirits," as of old, 
and to judge for ourselves. There is, no doubt, much of 
the life beyond that we cannot see or comprehend. The 



FACTS OF SPIEIT-PKESENCE. 101 

surety of soul and senses that such a life is, the glimpses 
we get of it, the precious tests and messages that come to 
feed the hunger of the heart, are enough. Evidence that 
the future life is a grand and solid and lasting truth, and 
that spirits can and do pass from one world to the other, 
we need, and we have it. 

I have found mental, vocal, or written questions answered 
with equal readiness. I once occupied fifteen minutes in a 
circle of six or eight persons, asking mental questions and 
getting ready and correct answers, by raps and the motions 
of a light stand, while the medium and all others present, 
were saying that the raps and motions came without any 
meaning or system. I knew the meaning, as did the in- 
visible intelligence present, but they did not. Did they 
read my mind ? 

In De Ruyter, Madison County, N. Y., I was shown 
a letter from E. W. Primm, of Belleville, 111., to Julius 
Hill, a man of character and integrity. Mr. Primm writes 
that he had a communication through a medium, from one 
George W. Knowlton, of De Ruyter, and none of them had 
ever heard of the man or the town. Soon after, he saw 
Mr. Hill's name in the Religio- Philosophical Journal as a 
subscriber, and wrote to learn of Knowlton. Mr. Hill knew 
and described him and wrote for a copy of the communi- 
cation, which came, and which an intelligent neighbor, not a 
spiritualist, thought very like Knowlton, in ideas and style. 

In my presence, last autumn, in a public meeting at 
Brown's Hall, Georgetown, Madison County, N. Y., S. 
P. Hoag, of East Homer, — a man of well-known integ- 
rity and intelligence, of Quaker descent, not a professional 
medium, but giving his experiences reluctantly and for the 
common good, — stood on the platform, and, pointing to a 
man in the audience, said, " I see beside you a soldier 
mortally wounded and standing near 3-011 ;" describing the 



102 THE LNNER LIFE. 

person and the wound. The man rose and said, " I am a 
stranger here, no one knows me. I am from Pennsylvania. 
My brother was shot in that way by my side in a battle." 
Was this "unconscious cerebration," or "mental prepos- 
session?" or what other nonsense can so-called science 
trump up to expose its own folly to the future? 

By what psj^chometric or clairvoyant power, or by what 
message from the spirit-world, could D. D. Home reveal the 
inner life of a stranger ?\~"We are told how he was once at 
a party in London, when he heard one gentleman say to 
another, "There's that humbug Home." The celebrated 
medium glanced at him, perfect stranger as he was, and 
instantly had presented to him an extraordinary scene from 
the man's past life. Turning to him, Home spoke words to 
this effect: " Sir, in the year 1849, on the 4th of June, 
3*ou were at a small town in Sussex, the name of which I 
need not mention. You there got into a quarrel with a 
young man whom you thought paid too much attention 
to " 

Here the stranger turned pale, seized Home by the arm, 
dragged him away to a distant part of the room, and said, 
" For God's' sake, not another word ! I see you have the 
power that is claimed for }*ou. I ask your pardon." The 
stranger subsequently became one of his best friends. 

The Swiss writer, Zschokke, tells of his own like power ; 
and Schopenhauer, an eminent German savant and philos- 
opher, gives an instance of a like gift in his life. In our 
country, E. V. Wilson has startled many a stranger and 
convinced many a materialist, by revelations of their most 
secret experiences. 

At Lake Pleasant, Mass., on a Saturday in August, 1877, 
I met J. F. Baxter — then residing near Boston, and never 
a resident in the West — for the first time and only for a 
moment. The next day we were both on the platform before 
an audience of over two thousand people, and he described 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 103 

the venerable figure, the Quaker dress, the broad-brimmed 
white hat, and the cane of my revered friend, Richard 
Glazier, of Ann Arbor, Michgian. He gave too, and by 
this I recognized the person, his leading traits, his earnest 
interest in freedom and progress, his inflexible will and 
royal integrity, and told, what I knew nothing of but learned 
to be true afterward, of his efforts to release an alleged 
criminal some forty years ago, his fruitless appeal to Gov. 
Barry of Michigan, and the criminal's escape. His name 
and residence too were given, and on that and the follow- 
ing days a score of tests, equally remarkable, were given 
to me and to others. 

In 1878, Mr. Slade was in Melbourne, Australia, and his 
seances and tests excited profound interest. The Mel- 
bourne Argus said : 

"A gentleman in Sidney called on Dr. Slade, and took with, him a com- 
pass. Placing it on the table, he requested the doctor to put his hand on it, 
but, contrary to his expectations, the needle moved not. They then joined 
hands, and the doctor putting one hand to the needle, covering his visitor's 
hands with his other one, was astonished himself to see the needle deflected 
more than sixty degrees. The day following I was up again to see him, and 
he told me of this, bearing out exactly what my friend the scientist had 
said, and turning round to his side-table, he took a small compass from it, 
and placing it between us, joined hands with me and said, ' This is the way 
we did it,' but to his surprise the needle did not move. ''Why,' said he, 
' that is curious, it moved yesterday, but perhaps the spirits want you to do 
it.' I disengaged my hand from his, and held it towards the needle, and it 
immediately followed my finger whichever side I put it. He then pushed 
the compass far from us, to the extreme edge of the table, and we sat away, 
but in full view of it. 'Now,' said Dr. Slade, 'will the spirits please re- 
volve the needle, if we wish it ?' Three raps answered him, and the needle, 
with no one near it, turned round several times. Perhaps scientific men 
will explain this, but before they attempt it, let them take their own com- 
passes, and the doctor will, I doubt not, be only too happy to convince 
them." 

At a seance by Mr. Slade, at the home of A. Aksakof, — 
a Counselor of the Czar of Russia, and an Imperial official 
of the great St. Petersburg University, — two pocket 
compasses were placed on the table, side by side and in 



104 THE INNER LIFE. 

sight of the select and eminent company present. The 
request was made that the needle of one should turn while 
that of the other remained stationary, which was done in a 
way indicating power and intelligence, and destroying the 
theory of a concealed magnet. This reminds me of a device 
of Prof. Hare of New York, who, some twenty-five years 
ago, arranged cords and pulleys in such a manner as to 
establish a connection between the pressure exerted by the 
medium's hand at one end of a table, and the revolving 
finger of a dial-plate at the other end, turned away from 
the medium's sight. On the circumference of that plate, 
like the figures on a clock-face, were the letters of the 
alphabet, and messages were spelled out easiry and rapidly 
by the finger turning to the letters and so making up 
words and sentences, without the medium's external knowl- 
edge, which were recorded by a scribe sitting by. 

In his " Spirit Identity," a London book, M. A. (Oxon), 
an English gentleman of scholarly repute, gives his experi- 
ence at a seance, at the home of his friend Dr. Stanhope T. 
Speer, Douglas House, Alexander Road, London ; the me- 
dium a gentleman in private life, not a professional or 
public medium. After raps, moving of a table, carrying of 
small solid objects from one room to another, with no con- 
tact of hands, and large spirit-lights, he tells how, on May 
22, 1873, this medium held the following conversation with 
spirits. He (Oxon) writing the questions, and the answers 
coming by what Dr. Carpenter would call " unconscious 
cerebration governing the motions of the hand : " — 

Question. ' ' Can 3-011 read ? " 

" No, friend, I cannot, but Zachary Gray can, and R . 

I am not able to materialize nryself, or to command the 
elements." 

Q. "Are either of those spirits here?" 

" I will bring one by and bj'. I will send . R 

is here." 



FACTS OF SPIEIT-PRESENCE. 105 

Q. "I am told you can read. Is that so? Can you 
read a book ? " 

(Spirit handwriting changed.) "Yes friend ; with diffi- 
culty." 

Q. " Will you write for me the last line of the first book 
of the J^neid?" 

"Wait. — ' Omnibus errantem terris, et Jiuctibus aetas.' " 

Q. "Right. But I might have known it. Can j-ou go 
to the bookcase, take the last book but one on the second 
shelf, and read me the last paragraph of the ninety-fourth 
page? I have not seen it, and do not know its name." 

" ' I will curtly prove, by a short historical narrative, that 
popery is a novelty, and had gradually arisen and grown 
up since the primitive and pure times of Christianity, not 
only since the apostolic age, but even since the lamentable 
union of kirk and state by Constantine.' " 

(The book, on examination, proved to be a queer one, 
called Roger's Antipopopriestian. The extract was accu- 
rate, but the word "narrative" substituted for "account.") 

Q. ' ' How came you to pitch upon so appropriate a sen- 
tence ? " 

"I know not, my friend. It was a coincidence. The 
word was changed by error. I knew it when it was done, 
but would not change." 

Q. "How do you read? You wrote more slowly, and 
by fits and starts." 

" I wrote what I remembered, and then I went for more. 
It is a special effort to read, and useful only as a test. 
We can only read when conditions are very good. We will 
read once again, and write, and then impress 3*011 with the 
book : — ' Pope is the last great writer of that school of 
poetry, the poetry of the intellect, or rather of the intellect 
mingled with the fancy.' 

" This is truly written. Go and take the eleventh book on 
the same shelf. [I took the book, called Poetry, Romance, 



106 THE INNER LIEE. 

and Rhetoric.'] It will open at the page for you. Take it 
and read, and recognize our power, and the permission 
which the great and good God gives us, to show 3-011 of our 
power over matter. To Him be glory. Amen." 

(The book opened at page 145, and there was the quota- 
tion. I had not seen the book, and had no idea of its con- 
tents.) 

These are strong proofs of spirit-identity, messages, and 
intelligence free from the mind of the medium, or of any 
one. Here, as in thousands of cases, the intelligence claims 
to be a spirit. Are all these cases, where such claim is 
made, fraud or self-delusion? As for the "unconscious 
cerebration " notion of Dr. Carpenter it is simply absurd, 
and inadequate. Far apart, in space and time, have these 
tests been give*n, and over oceans and continents are found 
the spiritual power and personal spirit-intelligence which 
can give them. 

In broad daylight, in an uncarpeted upper chamber of a 
private house, I once saw a young man sit quietly by a 
heaV} r table, touching it with his finger tips. Four strong 
men tried in vain to hold it motionless, but were drawn 
along the floor, as it moved away, until their firm grasp 
tore out one of its legs. I felt their pulses in rapid motion, 
and they were flushed and perspiring freely. I felt the 
young man's pulse in quiet motion, and laid my hand on 
his arm and forehead to feel the skin cool and natural. 
This was invisible power, with no special intelligence. I 
once sat down by the window of J. V. Mansfield's room on 
Sixth Avenue, New York, at noon, he being thirty feet 
away, wrote a letter to a friend as though he were still in 
the body, folded and sealed it, called Mansfield who came 
and sat down before me, laid his left fingers over the letter 
(in blank envelope), took paper and pencil and rapidly filled 
a sheet, which he pushed across the table to me. It was a 
clear and consecutive answer to mine, signed by my 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 107 

friend's name, each point and question answered in due 
order, and with allusions to distant persons, events, and 
plans, not known to him, not in my mind consciously, and 
not all known to me. Here was power and personal intel- 
ligence. I have sat across the table" from Henry Slade, in 
daylight, in his New York office, cleaned a double slate, 
put in the little bit of pencil, closed the slate and laid it on 
the table with my hand on it. He put one hand on the end 
nearest him, his other hand all the time in full sight on the 
table, and as we sat quietly talking or listening, the scratch 
of the pencil was heard ; when it ceased, I took the slate at 
once into my own hand and into another room alone, 
opened it and found the joined insides of both slates full 
of writing, with names and incidents in the distance alluded 
to, and good will of friends in the life beyond expressed. 
At Moravia, at Mr. Keeler's, with Mrs. Mary Andrews as 
the medium, I had my name spoken in the air before me in 
fifteen minutes after I reached the bouse from the cars, a 
perfect stranger, and my name purposely concealed. At 
the same place, in the light, I saw the brother of my wife, 
and heard his voice as he spoke his father's name and mine. 
I asked a lady next me, a stranger, to describe him, and 
she clearly described the face that I saw, so that it was not 
my imagination. More than twenty } T ears of careful in- 
vestigation have given me many such experiences, and a 
few frauds among them, readily detected. Whether the 
tricky spirits were in the body or out of the body, I could 
not always tell. In the light of such prolonged investiga- 
tion the flippant worthlessness of verdicts and opinions 
given by persons, after slight and shallow examination, is 
clear enough. It needs far more patient experience to sift 
out the pretense, and to know the realit} T , and prize it. 

I had known for twenty years an English lady, residing 
in an interior town in this State, a woman of eminent intel- 



108 THE INNER LIFE. 

ligence, clear judgment, large abilit}", and eminent religious 
integrity, and with excellent health of body to an advanced 
age. Her son, a young man at this time, and herself, were 
the only occupants of their house, and both were quietly 
asleep at midnight, in 1847, or before the " Rochester rap- 
pings." She was awakened by footsteps, as of some one 
coming up stairs, and then came three strong and distinct 
raps on her door, repeated three times at brief intervals,- 
and raps also on her bedstead and in other parts of her 
room in the air. She could not solve the matter, but 
thought it was her son, yet was not satisfied. At the same 
time three raps came on his door, and he rose and dressed, 
went to her room and sat by her bedside the rest of the 
night, talking of these strange occurrences. He feared it 
was ominous of evil, perhaps death, to her, and she had 
some shade of a like feeling in regard to him, but her strong 
mind lost no balance thereby. Some months after, a mem- 
ber of the family went to England and visited the home of 
her sister, who had died not long before. Her daughter 
says, " I want to tell } t ou the strange thing that took place 
at mother's death ; " and then told how that mother had 
talked of her sister in America a great deal, and had ex- 
pressed a deep desire to see her once more and then depart 
in peace. As her end approached, she lay insensible and 
so near lifeless, to appearance, that they all had doubts, as 
they sat around her, of her ever again opening her eyes or 
recognizing any one. This lasted nearly two hours, when 
she opened her eyes, rose, and sat up in her bed, and said 
in clear strong voice, ' ' I have been to America and seen 
my sister. I rapped, and rapped, and rapped, but I could 
not make' her hear." She then lay back on her pillow, and 
said, " Now I am through," closed her eyes, and was gone 
in a moment. It was found that this was at the very day 
and hour when these raps were heard by that sister in Amer- 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 109 

ica, and by her son. Her spirit, almost released from its 
dying body, must have found its way to the distant home 
of this beloved sister, and made the effort to have her pres- 
ence realized. 

The following article will explain itself, and add to the 
weight of evidence. 

"Remarkable Psychological Experience of a Michigan Pioneer 
and Railroad Builder. 

Editor Detroit Daily Post : The following remarkable narrative of a 
wonderful experience, I noted down carefully when it was related to me 
by Henry Willis of Battle Creek, whom I have known for years, a man 
of frank integrity, uncommon energy in business, clear and vigorous in- 
tellect, practical sagacity, firm and strong nerve, and fine physical 
health. He came from Pennsylvania to oversee the building of the Mich- 
igan Central Railroad, under State authority, from Detroit to Ypsilanti, has 
been well known in this region since, enjoys good health at seventy years 
of age, as a result of his Quaker temperance, and has as the result of his 
energy and industry a fair competence, which might have been much larger 
had not his hospitality and public spirit been generous and active. 

The reference to former well-known residents of this city, some still here, 
makes this narrative of additional interest. M. W. Baldwin was the first 
locomotive builder in America, and gave name to the great locomotive works 
of Baldwin & Co., in Philadelphia. He was an intimate friend of Mr. 
Willis all his life, connected with him in business and on cordial and familiar 
terms. I give the words of Henry Willis as given to me at his house by 
himself. He has seldom told this strange story, and could only be induced 
to allow its publicity as a possible help to psychological and spiritual research 
and knowledge. He said : 

'In July, 183S, M. W. Baldwin, of Philadelphia, Pa., came with me to 
Detroit, intending to start a branch locomotive building shop on Cass Wharf, 
or river front. We remained near three weeks in Detroit together. I was 
at that time engaged to build a railroad from Kalamazoo to Allegan, of 
which Sydney Ketchum, of Marshall, was president. I think it was on a 
Thursday morning I left my friend Baldwin for Allegan ; he was to leave 
on a steamboat at 10 o'clock of the samc_day for his home. As I passed 
through Marshall on Friday, Ketchum requested me to go to Sandusky, 
Ohio, and purchase provisions for our railroad men, as there were none to 
be had on our route, the country being new. I came on and stopped at 
Battle Creek to visit. On Saturday and Sunday I became very uneasy. I 
was frequently asked if I was unwell. On Monday morning I went East 
with some friends in their carriage, and on Tuesday attended a Quaker 



110 THE INNER LIFE. 

quarterly meeting at Richard Glazier's, near Ann Arbor. I was asked by 
many if I was unwell. My mind was much depressed, but I bore up and 
endeavored to be cheerful, and after meeting, left for Sandusky in company 
with friends living near Adrian. We spent that night at Jacob Walton's, 
and still I was uneasy, and could not imagine the cause. At Tecumseh I 
stopped to take the stage and paid my fare to Sandusky. The stage drove 
up within fifteen or twenty feet of the door of the hotel. I handed the 
driver my carpet-bag, three passengers were inside, and as I put my foot on 
the step to get in, I felt a heavy blow on the back of my neck, and the words 
" go to Detroit " were as audibly, but inwardly, heard as I ever heard any- 
thing. I turned to see who struck me : no one except the driver and pas- 
sengers, all before me, was nearer than the hotel, twentj r feet off. I stood 
astonished, and passengers and driver shouted, " Why don't you get 
aboard ? " I said, " Driver, hand me my bag." I took it, went to the hotel 
and asked the landlord who it was that struck me on the back of my neck. 
"No one was nearer you than I, standing here in the door; I saw you," 
said he, " give a bound as you put your foot on the step, but no one struck 
you I know, for I was looking directly at you. What is the matter ? " 
he asked. " I must go to Detroit," I said, " and cannot imagine why or for 
what; I have no business there." The Chicago stage drove up in a moment 
or two. I mounted the seat with the driver, handed him fifty cents to drive 
his route as fast as he could. I repeated it with the next driver. When we 
drove into the upper end of Main Street at Ypsilanti, I told him to go directly 
to the railroad, not to stop at the stage office, and I would make it all right 
with Hawkins, the stage man. I felt as though I wanted to fly, so anxious 
was I to reach the station. As we turned out of Main Street I saw an engine 
on the track. The engineer said to the fireman, as I afterward learned, 
" Let us go ; we can't find Willis." The fireman looked around, saw the 
stage, and said, "Stop; Willis must be in that stage." He jumped down, 
ran, and met us three hundred feet off. I knew him and said, " Why, Jack, 
what on earth is the matter ? " and he answered, " Baldwin fell down sick in 
the hotel two or three hours after you left last Thursday. His great wish has 
been to have you with him. We have been out for days to try and find you. 
This morning when we left it was doubtful if he lived till night." We went 
to Detroit as fast as the engine could go. I ran to the hotel where the Rus- 
sell House now stands, and as I reached the head of the stairs, the landlord 
and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Wales, Dr. Hurd, and five or six of the servants, were 
at the door. Dr. Hurd said, " He is gone." I pushed into the room, threw off 
my coat, and applied my hands over his head and down the sides of his face 
and neck as vigorously as I could for some five or six minutes, when he spoke : 
" Henry, where have you been ? where have I been ? Oh, how much I have 
wanted you with me ! " Dr. Hurd said, " Well, if that is not bringing a man 
to life, what will ? " This action of mine, like magnetizing, I can not account 
for. I never did it before or ever saw it done. He was in a trance or spasm, 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. Ill 

but not dead. Dr. Hurd told me his symptoms were those of a dying man. 
I remained seven weeks with him, never sleeping in all that time on a bed, 
except about four or five hours in Lewis Cass, Jr.'s room, when C. C. Trow- 
bridge and August Porter relieved me one night. I took him home on a 
cot to his family in Philadelphia, he not having been able to sit up for some 
eight or nine weeks. I think it was in 1844 or 1845 I was at work in my 
nursery of fruit trees, at Battle Creek, with my mind then, as it often had 
been, on this strange, andto me, unaccountable matter ; how I was some sixty 
miles from Detroit, going directly away to the South, and on important 
business, and why I should have changed my course, and a voice said to 
me, "The spirit of Baldwin's father was after you to go and save his son 
and take him to his family." Down to this time I had never told a living 
being about this singular affair, not even Baldwin himself. From the mo- 
ment that I was thus notified in my nursery why I went to Detroit I ceased 
to wonder, and was, and stdl am, convinced that there was an invisible 
power tbat followed me from the time I arrived at Battle Creek until I took 
Baldwin to his home. Spiritualism was not thought of at that time. I had 
never before been so singularly uneasy in my mind. The instant I took my 
carpet-bag from the driver at Tecumseh, I felt a relief, but was exceedingly 
anxious to proceed to Detroit. "We arrived at Ypsilanti two or three hours 
before the time for the cars to leave for Detroit, hence the strangeness of 
my anxiety to get to the railroad, since I knew nothing of an engine being 
in waiting for me, nor did I think of an engine until we turned from Main 
street and saw it some eighty rods off. It is impossible for me to describe my 
feelings during four days and nights prior to my yielding to go to Detroit, 
nor did I even think of Baldwin, except to suppose he was ou his way home. 
The instant I gave up to go I felt great relief, but was very anxious to be 
off as fast as possible.' 

Any comment on these remarkable facts would be superfluous. They give, 
surely, abundant food for thought. 

Detroit, Mich., April, 1877. G. B. Stebbins." 

In 1878, Hudson Tuttle and myself were engaged in 
selecting and compiling for publication the writings left 
by our friend, Selclen J. Finne} r , of California. Mr. Tut- 
tle wrote a letter to Finney, and sent it to J. V. Mansfield, 
in New York. I copy his statement of the case : 

" After writing the letter I folded the sheet and pasted two folds of paper 
over it. I then cut notches in a card, and laying this card on the folds made 
dots in each notch, scarcely visible, and such as no one would notice, so 
that, if the folds were unfastened and again brought together it would be 
impossible to bring the dots iuto their former position so that the notches 
would correspond. I put this in a gray envelope, which I secured in like 
manner, and made dots at the notches. This I enclosed in my letter to 



112 THE INNER LIFE. 

Mr. M., unaddressed, and with no clue to its contents. I will here say that 
when it was returned I examined it, with several friends, and all pro- 
nounced that the letter sent (in the blank envelope) had not been tampered 
with, or opened. Dots, pasted wrappers, and all was intact, and no one 
could read tbe contents. 

The letter thus sent (and returned) read as follows : 

' Berlin Heights, Ohio, Dec. 29, 1878. 

S. J. Finney : Dear Brother. Will you confer the great favor on me 
of going to J. V. Mansfield, and answering, through him, the following 
questions : 

Are you satisfied with the manner in which Mr. Stebbins and myself 
have edited your MSS. ? 

Have you any suggestions to make ? 

What will be the outcome of the present great spiritual movement ? 

Truly thine, Hudson Tuttle." 

To this the following answer was returned (in same en- 
velope with the unopened letter above given) : 

"Dear Brother Tuttle: 

Yours of December 29, is before me, for which accept thanks. Sel- 
dom a day passes but I am with you some portion of the day. I have not 
been unmindful of your labors, or those of Brother Stebbins, in elucidating 
matters so near to my soul. The course pursued by you both meets my 
entire approval, not only in that particular, but the course you have pur- 
sued in matters .... generally Go forward, my brother, fearing 

nothing while you have that interior evidence that your labors are ap- 
proved 

My motto while on earth, and now is : That any system of theology that 
shrinks from investigation openly declares its own error. 

Be kind enough, dear brother, to send words of cheer to my dear sorrow- 
ing ones at Pescadei-o. Tell them Selden lives and loves them dearly. 

Here comes Aggie, saying: 'Say to brother and sister — Love, love, 
love ! ' 

Touching the great Spiritual Movement throughout the world, I am sure 
it will override all other isms of the clay, and within the next hundred 
years become universal throughout the whole world. Then, and not till 
then, will the millennium come on the earth. S. J. Finney." 

The letter and answer tells its own story, and the pres- 
ence of Aggie Tuttle, an affectionate sister of Hudson 
Tuttle, is manifested in a characteristic manner. 

A letter was once sent to Mr. Mansfield, from a third 
person, uuknown to the one that carried the letter, and the 



FACTS OP SPIEIT-PEESENCE. 113 

answer, in a strange language, and in unknown characters, 
on being taken back to the unknown writer, proved to be a 
message in Chinese, in response to a letter to his father 
who passed away twenty 3-ears ago from China. Mr. Ar 
Showe, of New York, the writer, then went to Mansfield's 
rooms with witnesses, and carried another sealed letter in 
Chinese, which was answered in the same language in ten 
minutes, b} r Mr. Mansfield, who sat constantly in the pres- 
ence of all the witnesses, the answer giving family names 
and intelligence. "Unconscious cerebration" and "men- 
tal prepossession" must be apt Chinese scholars and writers ! 

During my work with Mr. Tuttle, in editing the writings 
of Mr. Finney, a letter came from Tuttle telling me of a 
spirit-message, through himself, from Finney. About a ■ 
month after, I then being in Washington, D. C, I called 
on a lady friend, (a medium in private, known as such 
only to a few of her intimates, but having her own daily 
experiences), who soon said, " I feel the presence and in- 
fluence of a new spirit. It is delicate, refined, and } r et 
strong, exalted, and wise. He comes to you." She then 
gave me the same message, 4n substance, but not in words, 
that I had received from Mr. Tuttle, and I was told that 
it had been given to my friend on Lake Erie, who was 
writing and compiling with me. Then she gave me the 
name of S. J. Finne}', whom she had never seen, hardly 
knew of, and of whom I was not thinking when this began. 
Her good sense and excellence are unquestioned. She was 
fully conscious, and I had unexpected and unsought con- 
firmation of the message from the distant North. She had 
not met Mr. Tuttle, and did not know of our joint work. 

In the early days of Methodism, there was a rich vein 
of spiritual truth and insight that gave light and vital 
power to that movement. Dr. Adam Clarke, the author of 
one of the best of the older Bible Commentaries, said : 



114 THE INNER LIFE. 

"I believe there is a supernatural and a spiritual world in which human 
spirits, both good and bad. live iu a state of consciousness. 

I believe there is an invisible world, in which various orders of spirits live 
and act. 

I believe that any of these spirits may, according- to the order of God, in 
the laws of their place of residence, have intercourse with this world and 
become visible to mortals. 

I believe there is a possibility to evoke, and have intercourse with spirits, 
and to employ in a certain limited way, their power and influence." 

John Wesley, the great pioneer and apostle of Methodism, 
whose praise is in all the churches, tells of one Elizabeth 
ITobson, a pious and worthy young woman whom he knew 
well and esteemed highly, who told him : 

"From my childhood, when any of our neighbors died, whether men, 
women, or children, I used to see them. I was not at all frightened, it was 
so common. Indeed, many times I did not know they were dead. I saw 
many of them both by day and by night. Those who came in the dark, 
brought light with them. I observed all little children, and many grown 
persons, had a bright and glorious light around them ; but many had a 
dismal gloomy light, and a dusk cloud over them. When I told my uncle 
this, he did not seem at all surprised." 

In a note Mr. Wesley saj's : 

" It appears highly probable that he (the uncle with whom she lived) was 
himself experimentally acquainted with these things." 

After relating numerous like experiences, of this 3'oung 
woman and others, he says : 

"What pretence have I to deny well-attested facts because I cannot com- 
prehend them ? It is true most of the men of learning in Europe have 
given up all accounts of apparitions as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry 
for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of entering, my solemn protest 
against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to 
those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. They well know 
(whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up these apparitions is, 
in effect, giving up the Bible ; and they know, on the other hand, that if but 
one account of the intercourse of men with separate spirits is admitted, 
their whole castle in the air (Deism, Atheism, and Materialism) falls to 

the ground One of the capital objections to all these accounts, 

which I have known urged over and over, is this : ' Did you ever see an 
apparition yourself? ' No : nor did I ever see a murder, yet I believe there 
is such a thing, .... yet the testimony of unexceptionable witnesses fully 
convinces me both of the one and the other With my latest breath 



FACTS OF SPIKIT-PEESENCE. 115 

will I bear ray testimony against giving up to infidels one of the greatest 
proofs of the invisible world. I mean that of apparitions, confirmed by the 
testimony of all ages." 

These worthy and gifted pioneers were not far from the 
spiritualism of to-da}^, which many of their professed fol- 
lowers not only fail to understand, but pitifully misrepre- 
sent. To such we would commend the vulgar attack on 
early Methodism of Hazlitt, a noted English scholar, who 
wrote in The Round Table, in 1817, and whose poor words 
are in the English Classics : 

" The principles of Methodism are nearly allied to hypocrisy, and almost 
unavoidably slide into it. They may be considered as a collection of re- 
ligious invalids ; the refuse of all that is weak and unsound in body and 
mind. Methodism may be defined to be religion with its slobbering bib and 
go-cart. It is a bastard kind of Popery, stripped of its painted pomp and 

outward ornaments, and reduced to a state of pauperism It does not 

impose any tax upon the understanding. Its essence is to be unintelligible. It 

is carte blanche for ignorance and folly One of its favorite places of 

worship combines the noise and turbulence of a drunken brawl at an ale- 
house with the indecencies of a bagnio They .... revel in a sea 

of boundless nonsense." 

The words of Whittier well apply here : 

" Why turn 
These pages of intolerance over ? 

That in their spirit dark and stern, 
Ye haply may your own discover." 

But light spreads and truth gains, and there are witnesses, 
even in the pulpits, to the reality of angel visitants, natural 
and not miraculous. Dr. H. W. Thomas, an eminent Meth- 
odist clergyman in Chicago, has the rare courage to speak 
his own opinions. In a sermon he said : 

"Tome this doctrine of the spirit-life, the immanence and presence of 
helping and guiding spirits, is a comforting thought. It brings me into the 
presence of the innumerable host that people the spirit-land. It gives me a 
consciousness of the great fact of immortality. It gives me a sweet con- 
sciousness that my friends live on the other shore, and that, to me, they 
will come as~ ministering angels in the dying-hour, to receive the spirit, 
weakened and pale, and bear it to the love and the life above." 

In reply to the assertion that angelic ministry and help 



116 THE INNER LIFE. 

in the affairs of this world cannot be, because so many do 
not know it, he well says : 

" The earth turned on its axis and swept round the sun on its orbit for 
thousands of years, and man knew nothing of it." 

There is no end to the .testimony of many witnesses 
ample to fill many great volumes, and there must be a limit 
to the selection, yet the following is worthy of attention. 
Rev. Joseph Cook, a widely known lecturer and preacher, 
is not a believer in spirit manifestations, seems not to 
understand their significance or the real character and 
power of the spiritual movement, but has the courage to 
investigate facts and the honor to report them fairly. At 
the Old South Church, Boston, March 15, 1880, he gave 
the closing lecture of his winter's course, on Spiritual Phe- 
nomena, and after some preliminary words on another sub- 
ject said [see Banner of Liglit~\ : 

" No one knows how shy I have all my life been of quacks ; but of all 
quacks, the theological quack, the quack who stands between man and his 
fear of heaven and hell, has had the bulk of my loathing. In the library 
of Mr. Epes Sargent, last Saturday, I consented to meet a psychic (a me- 
dium). I took with me my family physician and my wife and a friend of 
hers, a lady who herself had performed psychic experiments for Mrs. 
Stowe, and that lady's husband. Of the nine persons present, five were 
unbelievers. 

1. Five strong gas jets, four in a chandelier over the table and one in a 
central position on the table, were burning all the while in the library where 
the experiments took place. 

2. At no time were the slates taken from the sight of any one of the nine 
persons who watched them.-* The writing was not produced, as was Slade's 
in London and at Leipsic, on slates held under a table. 

3. The utmost care was taken by all the observers to see that the slates 
were perfectly clean just before they were closed. 

4. During the first experiment, nine persons clasped each one hand or two, 
over and under the two slates. The psychic's hands were among the others, 
and he certainly did not remove his hands from this position while the 
sound of the writing was heard 

[Copt.] 
Report of the Observers of the Sargent Experiments in Psychography. 
At the house of Epes Sargent, on the evening of Saturday, March 13th, 
the undersigned saw two clean slates placed face to face with a bit of slate- 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 117 

pencil between them. We all held our hands clasped around the edges of 
the two slates. Mr. Watkins's (the medium's) hands also clasped the slates. 
In this position we all distinctly heard the pencil moving 1 , and on opening 
the slates found an intelligent message in a strong masculine hand, in 
answer to a question asked by one of the company. 

Afterwards two slates were clamped together with strong brass fixtures 
and held at arm's length by Mr. Cook, while the rest of the company and 
the psychic had their hands in full view on the table. After a moment of 
waiting the slates were opened, and a message in a feminine hand was found 
on one of the inner surfaces. There were five lighted gas-burners in the 
room at the time. 

We cannot apply to these facts any theory of fraud, and we do not see how 
the writing can be explained unless matter, in the slate-pencil, was moved 
without contact. 

F. E. Bundy, M.D. 
Epes S argent. 
John C. Kinney. 
Heney G. White 
Joseph Cook. 
Boston, March 13th, 1880. 

[The original of this report is in Mr. Cook's possession.] " 

Sometimes scientific men come to the very verge of a 
rational solution of such facts as these, and then fail to go 
on, but turn back into uncertain paths. In New York, in 
1873, Agassiz gave eight lectures on the "Methods of 
Creation," and spoke, in the last lecture, of some interest- 
ing experiments of Dr. Brown-Sequard, who " has satisfied 
himself," as Agassiz said, " that the subtile mechanism of 
the human frame — about which we know so little in its 
connection with mental processes — is sometimes acted upon 
by a power outside of us, as familiar with that organism as 
we are ignorant of it." 

This surely draws near the idea, and the demonstrated 
fact, of the power of intelligent personal, spiritual beings, 
once denizens of earthly bodies, now making the finer 
spiritual body their homes and instruments, to act upon 
" the subtile mechanism of the human frame." Indeed 
this seems to be the only reasonable solution and cause 
of such aotion, } r et that cause neither of these eminent 



118 THE INNER LIFE. 

men have assigned. Agassiz has gone to that higher 
life, where he can pursue his studies with clearer sight and 
broader range, and for his distinguished friend, and others 
like him, we can work and wait. Time and truth will con- 
quer at last. 

Meanwhile men, in the inspiring hours of great occa- 
sions, when the spirits speaks, instinctively tell of the pres- 
ence of the departed. At Lexington, Mass., in April, 1875, 
at the Centennial Celebration of the old battle of 1775, 
Thomas Merriam Stetson, president of the da}', said: 

" And must we now and henceforth omit to greet the men of 1775 ? The 
funeral drums have long since heralded to the grave the last survivor of 
those venerable forms who so long attended our celebrations — but, if it is 
true that the dead ever i - evisit the scenes of their earthly grandeur, what 
invisible auditors throng around us to-day ! Adams and Hancock, whose 
veiled presences stand on this ■platform, are zoith us. They are all with us. 
For, of the rewards which Heaven gives to those who strive and die for 
their country, we can conceive of none more magnificent than the gratitude 
of a nation saved for liberty. Their Heaven to-day will be here. The dead 
heroes are with us in our triumphal pageant. We reverently welcome their 
companionship to-day." 

Here is another remarkable experience, which I give as 
heard from the lips of the lady,' and condensed from her 
report of it in the Sunday Times of New Orleans. Mrs. 
E. L. Saxon is a woman of well-known social standing, 
mental ability, and personal character. Her fearless and 
devoted services among the sick in the dark days of j'ellow 
fever in New Orleans, her enlisting the aid and indorse- 
ment of leading men and women in Louisiana on behalf of 
woman-suffrage, and addressing the Constitutional Conven- 
tion on that reform, are known to many, and her frank 
acceptance of the facts of spirit-presence shows her fidelity 
of soul. I quote from her article in the Times, and from my 
notes of her narration to me, both of which, as she says, are 
" literally true." Born in Tennessee, her married life spent 
in Alabama and New Orleans ; she was her father's child, 



FACTS OF SPntlT-PEESENCE. 119 

like him in mind and soul as well as person, and a close 
spiritual S3'mpathy existed between them. He went to 
Arkansas in 1857. In the spring of 18G1 she was in 
Mobile with her husband, and he left her at the Battle 
House while he was absent on business a few days. The 
civil war had just opened, and she was anxious for her 
absent father and her two beloved half-brothers. They 
entered the Confederate arm}*, and the father was a non- 
combatant, having little faith in the success of the South, 
yet all were strongly attached to each other. One even- 
ing after a pleasant visit with friends, she went to her 
room, slept from eleven until two o'clock, and then came a 
dream, or rather a vision, so vivid as to banish sleep, and 
of which she wrote down each detail, and dated her writing 
that night. 

" I dreamed that I was with my father, who lay on an uncanopicd bed, 
the low ceiling almost touching the bedposts. Near the head of the bed 
(which was in the corner) was a door, at its foot another. The fireplace 
was nearly opposite the bed. On the opposite side of the room, and drawn 
in front directly across it, was a huge bed, or couch, jet black, with square 
ends, stiff and upright. In the opposite corner was a bureau, and over it a 
white cloth. My father was dying a death of the most terrible agony, and 
I was utterly alone (with him) in a distress and sorrow near to frenzy. This 
distress, apparently, as the soul left the body, aroused me from my wretched 
sleep." 

All this seemed so improbable that she tried to forget it, 
but could not. Her husband once met the brothers and 
learned of the father as still in Arkansas. She saw one of 
her brothers not long before he was killed in the battle of 
Chiekamauga, and learned from him of his great desire to 
see his father, to whom he felt strongly drawn. In Octo- 
ber, 1863, she had an intense and constant longing to see 
her father. Almost nightly, whether waking or sleeping 
she could not tell, she 

" Saw a venerable head and long flowing white beard; the blue eyes, dim 
as dying stars before the gleam of daylight, looked into mine, and a voice, 



120 THE INNER LIFE. 

a whisper, or loud and distinct, would fill rny cars: 'Go to him; he needs 
you; go at once.' Again and again I have roused my daughter, crying 
aloud, ' Who spoke to me ? Who called me ? ' " 

She had never seen her father wearing a beard or with 
white hair, and this strange vision turned her toward Ar- 
kansas. It was difficult to reach there amidst the perils 
of war. and at Memphis she decided to start for Cairo and 
New York, with her young son and daughter ; went on to 
the steamboat for that purpose, but a voice ever said, 
" Return, return." Holding a child in her lap while its 
mother went to take her tea, she found the woman was 

going to B , in Arkansas, where her father had lived. 

His name being spoken, this woman, a total stranger, cried 
out, "Leave this boat at once before it goes. He is here 
in the Irving Block; we heard to-clay, sick — dying ! " 
She found her way ashore, kindly helped by the captain 
of the boat, found her father, " with the white hair, the 
long beard, and the dim pleading e}*es " of her vision, in 
the prison, got his release, found quarters for him, and he 
died in fearful agon}^ just after daylight, none but herself 
with him, and she " knelt and watched beside the dead" in 
heart-stricken sorrow. When the day came she said : 

"I rose to my feet, my eyes fell on the white cloth thrown over the 
mirror and the bureau in the corner. The bed-clothing had been taken 
away; there stood the black couch, square, upright, and huge. The bed- 
posts within an inch of the ceiling. The bed in the corner, the doors. ' Like 
a revelation, I saw the literal fulfilment of my old prophetic dream.' That 
dream was the night of March 17, 18G1 ; this was December 11, 1863. Be- 
fore this I had argued that my distress of mind caused that dream 

My brother's desire to see our dear old father was expressed to me with a 
deep soul's fervor a short time before his death. Why should I not believe 
that his freed spirit sought that father, found him in his wretched condition* 
and impressed my own mind with it ? " 

People the invisible realm with our friends, ready to help 
and approach us, when it is well to do so and when we are 
in a mood to allow them, and in place of a mysterious and 



FACTS OF SPIBIT-PEESENCE. 121 

special Providence answering prayer, the soul, strong by its 
desires and aspirations, attracts these spiritual beings, and 
help and light come with them. Thus naturally do they 
become the angels, or messengers, of the Lord ; and thus, 
and b} T the strength that spiritual uplifting brings, is true 
prayer answered. 

From all ranks and conditions of life ; from scholars and 
nobles in Europe, from distant Asia and the far-off islands 
of the Southern ocean to the pioneers in their cabins 
on our western prairies and the dwellers on our Pacific 
coast, — 

" From farthest Ind to each blue crag 
That beetles o'er our western sea," 

reaches the broad realm wherefrom we glean our proofs 
of spirit-presence, tested and approved by thoughtful and 
critical witnesses. Baboo Peary Chand Mittra, of Cal- 
cutta, tells us in his valuable little work, " Spiritual Stray 
Leaves," that — 

" The Big Veda chanters did not think the soul, after death, was in a 
state of inactivity. Its mission was to 'protect the good,' to 'turn back to 
the earthly life to sow righteousness and to succor it.' It is thus evident 
that India was the cradle of Spiritualism — the land where a deep conviction 
was entertained of the immortality of the soul, of its endless porgression in 

the spiritual world, of its returning to earth These early Aryan 

teachings clearly show the belief that spirits hold communion with mortals 
for the purpose of gradually spiritualizing them, and thus extending the 

spiritual kingdom of God The spiritual world is composed of spirits 

of different will-force, but their real occupation is to spiritualize those whom 
they can reach. Their means are not always the same. There may be ex- 
ternal manifestations in some cases, which is an initiatory process. They 
work on the mind, on the sensations and emotions, that the man may sink 
into serenity — the first psychic stage. In the midst of the work of spirits 
we pass from sympathy to somnambulism, from somnambulism to clairvoy- 
ance, from clairvoyance to nirvana. In this way mediums are developed 
and communication between men and spirits is established. We sometimes 
know a great deal from the exercise of our own spiritual power. But we 
feel the influence of the spirits on our body and on our mind, and thus 
recognize them. We hear their words and we find that they are working 
on our will-power, that it may be entirely the power of the soul. What I 



122 THE INNER LIFE. 

have stated is from actual spiritual experience. For the last sixteen years I 
have heen associated with spirits who are not away from me for a moment, 
and I am not only spiritualized by them, but I am talking with them as I 
talk with those in the flesh. My debt of gratitude to God is endless for 
vouchsafing me this light, and I am anxious that Spiritualism should be 
solemnly thought of. Many points may not be clear, but let us endeavor to 
gain light in a fraternal spirit. Nothing delights me so much as the teach- 
ing of the Aryan philosophy, that God is in the soul as its internal light, 
and that true theosophy is to be in the soul-state, that being illumined by 

that light we may make an existence a bright one, here and hereafter 

The light within, if seen internally, is our guide, and leads us to endless 

love and wisdom It is not the creed, but the spiritual practice, the 

life of purity, the life of self-abnegation, and the life of unselfish love that 
develops the soul in which we have Divine reflection." 

It is interesting and noteworthy that this accomplished 
Hindoo, almost the first to interpret to Europe and America 
the religious ideas of his Aryan ancestry, should find in 
them the germs of modern Spiritualism, and should so 
frankly, and with such simple and fearless sincerity, tell 
of his own mediumistic experiences. 

How pitiful the talk we hear, how shallow the learned 
ignorance of grave books that we read, treating all these 
facts and ideas as " survivals of savage thought." In the 
childhood of man savage thought was but the instinctive 
germ reaching toward the light. This modern thought, in 
the same line, is that germ growing to new beaut}^ and 
reaching toward the flower and fruitage of a riper spiritual 
age to come. Johnson, in his Rasselas, makes the wise 
Imlac say : 

"That the dead are seen no more, I will not undertake to maintain 
against the concurrent testimony of all ages and nations. There is no 
people, rude or unlearned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not 
related and helieved. This opinion, which prevails as far as human nature 
is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard 
of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experi- 
ence could make credible. That it is doubted by single cavilers can very 
little weaken the general evidence ; and some who deny it with their tongues 
confess it with their fears." 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 123 

In lighter mood, yet with serious purpose, Ityron wrote : 

"I merely mean to say what Johnson said, 

That, in the course of some six thousand years, 
All nations have believed that from the dead 
A visitant at intervals appears." 

In his " Conflict of Science and Religion," Draper says : 

" That the spirits of the dead revisit the living, has been, in all ages, in 
all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated 
in by the intelligent. If human testimony on subjects can be of any value, 
there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present 
time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of any- 
thing whatever, that these shades of the dead do return." 

In their higher forms, spirit manifestation and com- 
munion come to man in his finest and most harmonious 
development, and in this last and ripest of the centuries 
we have them as never before. The facts of modern 
spiritualism are the proof-positive of immortality, and they 
are to confound materialism, and save all that is worth 
saving in dogmatic theology. The impersonal ideal of 
living again, " In minds made better by our presence," as 
George Elliot has it, is not enough. We want that and 
more. We crave a future being, vital and earnest. As 
Whittier sa} T s : 

" Not mine the hope of Indra's son, — 

Of slumbering in oblivion's rest, 
Life's myriads blending into one, 

In blank annihilation blest ; 
Dust-atoms of the infinite, 
Sparks scattered from the central light, 
And winning back through mortal pain 
Their old unconsciousness again. 
No ! I have friends in spirit-land. 
Not shadows in a shadowy band, 
Not others but themselves are they." 

As we think of our translated friends, we must and will 
feel as he did when he wrote : 



124 THE INNER LIFE. 

' There 's not a charm of soul or brow, 
Of all we knew and loved in thee, 
But lives in holier beauty now, 
Baptized in immortality." 

Epictetus, a Roman Pagan, said, "The universe is but 
one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by 
nature endeared to each other." Is not the freedom of the 
city given to these divine ones ? Shall they come to us ? 
To get gleams and glimpses through the Gates Ajar, to 
know through both soul and senses that our friends live, 
and can reveal their life to us, is a high and holy privilege, 
to be won if we follow the light and obey the law. How 
the spirit within asserts its immortality, which these facts 
confirm ! Well said an old poet : 

" We feel, througb all this fleshlie dresse, 
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse." 

With the growth of man's spiritual nature, and as the 
result of the inspiring facts of spirit-presence and mani- 
festation, there comes a new sense of the naturalness of 
the future life. In one of her letters, Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning speaks of this : 

" It seems to me that a nearer insight into the spiritual world has been 
granted to this generation, so that (by whatever process we get our convic- 
tion) we no longer deal with vague abstractions, half closed, half shadowy, 
in thinking of departed souls. There is now something warm and still 
familiar in those beloveds of ours, to whom we yearn out past the grave — 
not cold and ghostly as they seemed once — but human, sympathetic, with 
well-known faces. They are not lost utterly to us even on earth ; a little 
farther off, and that is all." 

Her words show the depth of her own thought and her 
clear understanding of the tendency of the thought of her 
day. Surely it is well and healthful to leave the "cold 
and ghostly" conceptions of the past and to find that " a 
nearer insight into the spiritual world " gives us ' ' some- 
thins; warm and still familiar " there, some sweet natural 



FACTS OF SPIRIT-PRESENCE. 125 

human life, touched with the radiance of a higher state of 
existence. 

The great German writer, Lessing, said that "the no- 
tion of future reward and punishment needs to be elimi- 
nated, that the incentive to holiness may be a perfectly pure 
one." To do the right for its own sake is noble indeed ; 
and Plato well said, "The perfectly just man would con- 
tinue steadfast in the love of justice, not because it is pleas- 
ant, but because it is right, and would be willing to pass for 
unjust while he practiced the most exact justice." There 
are no rewards or punishments, as man rewards and pun- 
ishes in his blind way, but obedience to natural law brings 
good, and disobedience pain and evil, in the divine economy. 
These results help to train us, if we heed them, to a truer 
conduct, and divine elements in us lift us toward the true 
and the beautiful. The voice within ever says : 

" It is not all of life to live, 
Nor all of death to die." 

Slowly but surely we are gaining an ideal of life here 
and hereafter, and of the naturalness of spirit-intercourse, 
that shall supplant and make more perfect the prevalent 
conceptions in our churches, as these have put aside and 
made better the conceptions of ruder clays. The facts of 
spirit-presence and the awakened interior life which the}' 
call out, is bringing a new and inspiring element into our 
literature. " Something rich and rare " we already see, — 
the dawn and promise of more. Light permeates and pene- 
trates, and no Papal anathema, or warning of bigots, or 
false "pride of science," can bar its beams or change its 
radiance to darkness. Time and truth are faithful allies, 
and they always win at last. 

We find the grim and ghastly fear of our mistaken edu- 
cation is passing away. Shakspeare gives the old dread 
and terror when he says : 



126 THE INNER LIFE. 

" It is the very witching time of night 
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out 
Contagion to the world ! " 

In like strain he portrays the ghost, at whose sight Ham- 
let exclaims : 

" Angels and ministers of grace defend us ! " 

and who declares that if they were not forbidden 

" To tell the secrets of their prison-house, 
They could a tale unfold whose lightest word 
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, 
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, 
Thy knotted and combined locks to part, 
And each particular hair to stand on end 
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine." 

In place of this superstitious dread is coming the sweet 
and sacred feeling of the lover and husband, described by 
that spiritually -gifted poet Edward Arnold, of London : 

" ' She is dead ! ' they said to him. ' Come away ; 
Kiss her and leave her : thy love is clay.' 



And they held their breaths, as they Jeft the room 

With a shudder, to glance at its stillness and gloom. 

But he who loved her too well to dread 

The sweet, the stately, the beautiful dead, — 

He lit his lamp and took his key 

And turned it, — alone were he and she." 

From the eternal being of God, the next step is to the 
immortal life of man. The interior and abiding evidence 
of this is the soul's sense of immortality, the normal out- 
look of man's interior vision toward a life bej-ond, but the 
outward evidence, through the senses, quickens the soul 
to new life, as the beauty of a fine landscape awakens and 
intensifies the sense of beauty slumbering within. Man 
must know Nature and his fellow-men through his outward 
senses, that his powers may be called out and his life per- 
fected. So he needs to get outward glimpses of the Im- 



FACTS OF SPIEIT-PEESENCE. 127 

mortal Life, that his interior sense of immortality may 
gain wealth and power ; and the time has come in the prog- 
ress of the race when these glimpses and visitations can 
be more frequent and satisfying than ever. The dear im- 
mortals have their mission of guardian care and tender 
affection for us, which it is pitiful blindness to ignore, 
and shallow folly to laugh at. A bereaved mother once 
told me of her grief at the loss of her child. Like Rachel 
of old " she mourned and refused to be comforted " until 
the agony of her grief, her tears in sleepless nights and 
through hopeless days, made her husband fear for her 
health and life. One morning he awoke to see her face 
sweetly serene, to hear her voice calm and peaceful, to see 
her go about her household duties cheerfully. At last he 
expressed his hopeful pleasure, and she said to him, " In 
the night, wakeful and weeping, all at once it seemed as 
though some unseen hands had laid our baby by nry side. 
I felt its warmth, I was thrilled with jo3^ as its tiny fingers 
touched my face, and the fragrance of its breath came to 
me. I held it for an hour, lying in sweet rest, and its dear 
presence feeding and filling my heart and soul. I knew it 
was not to stay, but it was so blessed to know that it lived 
and was with me. I felt I should never lose it, that a sense 
of its life and presence would last. Then, all at once, it 
was gone, but I had peace and hope." That " peace which 
passeth all understanding " is with that mother yet. 

I honor and reverence the lover of truth who gives up 
worldly success and reputation for its sake ; but when men 
feel bound to ignore their finest intuitions, to silence their 
immortal hopes and aspirations, and stifle their natural 
emotions for truth's sake, I feel that they are making a 
needless and mistaken, as well as a painful and injurious 
sacrifice. I have known brave souls, under the sway of 
materialistic thought, longing for the light and warmth 



128 THE INNER LIFE. 

of immortality, but saj-ing that they had no evidence, and 
that truth must be followed at whatever cost, and so living 
on, with their hearts chilled and hungiy, and j'et refusing 
to be warmed and fed. They are victims of a poor theory. 
Truth calls for no such martyrdoms ; for every healthful 
and normal faculty or desire of the soul there must be use 
and satisfaction, or the universe is full of injustice and 
fraud. The cold negations of materialism, the external 
and imperfect methods of inductive science, and the 
horrible dogmas of old theology are at fault. These are 
being tried and found wanting, and a Spiritual Philosophy 
will stand in their stead. 

Science must recognize the soul of things, and the innate 
spiritual faculties of the human soul, to make its processes 
more perfect and to be the ally of natural religion, yet the 
destroyer of all supernaturalism, superstition, and bigotry. 
With the idea of the body as the transient abode and fit 
temple of an immortal spirit must come spiritual culture, 
the soul supreme over the senses, self-poise, purity, and 
chastity, justice, conscience, and nobler morals in our 
daily life. 

Sectarian dogmatists suppose that the deca}- of materi- 
alism will give new life to the creed-bound churches : that 
theirs is the religion, their " plan of salvation " the plan, 
all else fatal error. This is a great mistake. "While dog- 
matism is smitten with sure decay, religion will be put on 
a basis deeper and older and more lasting than book or 
creed. In the soul of man and in the eternal verities will 
its sure foundations be placed. S. J. Finney well says : 

" There is no other universal Bible but the Creation and its informing 
Spirit. The human spirit or reason is the universal Bible rising into 
the language of love, justice, science, and philosophy. There is not a 
single pebble on the sea-sbore, not a rock on the mountain-top, not a world, 
nor a fountain, nor a flower, but invites us to read a divine revelation. Is it 
not universal ? Is it not universally accessible ? If you study a corn-cob 



FACTS OF SPIMT-PRESENCE. 129 

you get swept into the cycles of universal life. You commence with that 
silken tassel, and you study the laws of vegetative growth, and before you 
are aware of it, you are contemplating the everlasting genius of suns. Here 
is a universal revelation, the only one through which the Divine Intelligence 
addresses the senses and through the senses the soul. 

Says one, I don't see but your religion is simply science. Certainly, 
science, philosophy, and spirituality. Everything is a help to it. It points 
to eveiy scientific exploration, every scientific discovery, everything in the 

world as a revelation of the Divine Will, and of the Divine Law I 

have no doubt that Moses had a divine revelation ; nor have I any doubt 
every man and woman in the universe has a divine revelation. But it must 
be sought there, where that revelation is living. Religion is not a mere 
record ; religion is a process ; spiritual life is a process, a procession of the 
soul of the world. It is living ; it is vital ; it is full of power ; it is full of 
beauty ; it is full of devotion ; it is full of Love, full of Wisdom — it is not 
a dead record I do not think that simple, instinctive, thought- 
less life is the highest manifestation of religious life. That man or woman 
is most sublimely spiritual or religious who wills to know the nature of the 
Divine Laws, and then wills to obey them. It is then man most resembles 
the Divine nature when his virtue is the result of his own volition — when 
he, so to speak, copies the divine proceeding — when he has so directed and 
eliminated his energies, so harmonized them, that the powers of the world 
can make naught but music through them. 

To read a revelation, you must read it in the light in which it was written, 
or you never can read it at all ; and in order to read it in the light in which 
it was written, yottr private lamp must be kindled at the central sun of the 
world which illuminates that revelation. It is the spiritual eye that must be 
touched with the vital energies of that everlasting love. We cannot read 
any divine revelation by any other light, by any other power. This view is 
very hopeful — makes humanity divine." 

This coming religion can have no limiting dogmas or 
dwarfing creeds, used as finalities. As it lives they will 
die. The church of the future will be the free assemblage of 
spiritual thinkers, — of men and women meeting for growth 
and progress and culture, aiming to do and to be more, and 
more truly, day by day. 

The central idea of a Spiritual Philosoplry must be the 
Supreme and Indwelling Soul of Things, ever uplifting all 
to higher uses and finer harmony. By all true thought 
and deed and aspiration the Infinite Presence is in us, 
and its light and peace and strength are ours. Religion 
9 



180 THE INNER LIFE. 

will be manifest in practical righteousness, — being right 
and wise in daily life, — and all ascriptions of praise, all 
praj^er or ceremony, will be held useful onlj- as helps for 
this righteous conduct, and as light in our upward path. 
Listening to the voice within which says, "Thou shalt 
never die ! " we shall give due heed to the quickening and 
inspiring facts of spirit-presence, manifestation, and com- 
munion, bringing the immortal life near to us. As tests 
and evidences of interior truth they must hold high place. 
As we witness them we can well say : 

" Our hearts with glad surprise 
To higher levels rise ; 
The tidal wave of deeper souls 
Into our inmost being rolls." 

The sectarian churches are weak in their unreasoning and 
cruel dogmatism, which is falling before the mental and 
moral power of our day ; but they are strong in their ideas 
of Deity and Immortality, distorted and perverted as these 
are. Materialism is strong in its idea of the Reign of Law, 
but weak in its superficial and soulless philosophy. The 
Spiritual Philosophy will include the living ideas of the 
sects, but will rescue and separate them from theological 
dogmatism. It will include, too, the Reign of Law, 
but it will vitalize and enrich that great truth by making 
law the process of mind. It will be catholic in its ac- 
ceptance of truth and inspiration. Its method and aim 
are finely expressed by Whittier, in his " Questions of 
Life:" 

" I gather up the scattered rays 
Of wisdom in the early days, — 
Faint gleams, and broken, like the light 
Of meteors in a Northern night, 
Betraying to the darkling earth 
The unseen sun which gave them birth ; 
I listen to the sybil's chant, 
The voice of priest and hierophant ; 



FACTS OF SPIPIT-PEESENCE. 131 

I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, 
And what of life, and what of death, 
The demon taught to Socrates; 
And what, beneath his garden trees 
Slow-pacing, with a dream-like tread, 
The solemn-thoughted Plato said ; 
Nor lack I tokens, great or small, 
Of God's clear light in each and all." 

The golden words of Pj'thagoras, the fine morals of 
Epictetus, the high and pure ethics and compassionate 
tenderness of Buddha, the sweet and inspiring teaching 
of the Nazarene, — broad, comprehensive, full of spiritual 
wisdom, — the sublime monotheism of Mohammed, the 
great words of seer, and poet, and prophet of to-day, all 
past and present inspirations fairly and impartially judged, 
will be made helps to a higher and more harmonious life. 
We shall be hospitable to truth from both worlds, and pay 
heed to those who may come to us from beyond the change 
that we call death, as well as to spirits yet clad in these 
mortal forms. We shall study and interpret Nature and 
life in the light of innate ideas and interior principles. 
As this Spiritual or Harmonial Philosophy gains in per- 
fectness, 

"The world will be the better for it." 

All great religions have some gifted being as their cen- 
tral figure. They all started from the fresh and strong 
inspiration of some seer, — Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, 
and others, — and myths and miracles that these great 
teachers never sanctioned grew up around their names. 
Which saw and lived the most truth is not to be settled in 
these pages, and opinions vary with race and country. 
Enough for our present purpose to know that they 
were our elder brothers — great, yet not infallible — who 
helped the human race, each in his way and place. Chris- 
tianity, as interpreted by the best thought of its modern 



132 THE INNER LIFE. 

disciples, is not subjection to the word of Christ as author- 
ity, so much as love for his life, reverence of his ethics 
and spiritual culture as a natural revelation of the Godlike 
in humanity. The supernatural element will die out of 
these religions. Science has taught the world that miracles, 
violations of natural law, are impossible. "Walls of secta- 
rian division are breaking down. Thomas W. Higginson 
has well said, " The great religions are but larger sects; 
and we shall want the truths of all, the errors and dogma- 
tism of none of them." 

This true Catholicism should, and may, come first to the 
most advanced Christian peoples, and all creed-makers and 
dogmatists should understand that it must come. The old 
theological questions, on which fierce wars have been 
waged, and bitter disputes made, — transubstantiation, 
election, fore-ordination, baptism, — are wearing out and 
inconsequent. Clergy and laity have little wish or power 
to revive these old disputes. So will pass away the holy 
horror of heresy touching Bible infallibility, the vicarious 
atonement, the Trinity, eternal punishment, and the being 
of Deity, until Pagan and Christian clasp hands in token 
of the fellowship of man. Different schools and peoples 
may advocate different opinions ; there may be searching 
criticism and earnest warning, but persecution for opinion's 
sake must cease and Pharisaism come to an end. One 
danger of to-day is an indifference in regard to true think- 
ing and religious ideas. This is a transition time. The 
old dogmas are dying, and many fear, or are careless of 
affirming larger views. This indifference cannot last with- 
out disaster, for it deadens inspiration, and so, at last, 
undermines morals and conduct. We do not want a phi- 
losophy of sensuous and selfish pleasure ; we cannot rest 
with no philosophy, for a mental and moral vacuum starves 
and chills ; we cannot long make the body king, the soul 



FACTS OF SPIMT-PKESENCE. 133 

and mind transient dependents, and all human hopes and 
capacities cramped into a few brief years. We need a 
recognition of the supremacy of the spiritual element in 
man that shall give us more than the martyr-courage of the 
old confessors at the stake and in the fire, more than the 
grand strength of conscience which gave Puritanism its 
glory, and we would leave behind the narrow bigotry that 
made the martyr a persecutor, and marred the glory of the 
Puritan. 

Deeply impressed with the need and importance of right 
methods of thought and study ; believing in the clearness 
and fidelity of the spiritual method, which sees life and 
Nature from ivithin, " with the spirit and the understand- 
ing also ; " seeing that many are at the turning of the two 
paths which lead from theological dogmatism to material- 
ism or spiritualism, hesitating which to enter, — I have writ- 
ten these pages as some possible help to right thinking and 
a true ideal and conception of man and his capacities and 
destiny. 

The world needs a great awakening and uplifting to noble 
earnestness, to an inspiring and reverent sense of the Di- 
vine Presence, of the nearness and vital reality of the life 
beyond, and of the glory and wisdom of allegiance to the 
truths of the soul ; a sense so clear and warm that no dog- 
matism or materialism can chill or darken it. We have 
millions of soldiers and huge and hideous weapons of war 
in so-called Christian lands ; we have hundreds of millions 
spent for appetite which ends in degradation and .drunk- 
enness in our own country. We want peace on earth, and 
self-conquest born of the supremacy of the soul and the 
will over the senses, that shall end the fearful crime and 
waste of intemperance. We want a wiser, a more loving 
and fraternal conduct of daily life. The sectarian churches 
cannot well give it, try as they may, for sectarianism is 



184 THE INNER LIFE. 

opposed to reform and fraternity, and only accepts them 
when compelled and pushed on by an outward pressure. 
Their morals and ethics are too poor, their spirit too ex- 
clusive and narrow, their dogmatic finalities too barren. 
Be3 T ond all decaying dogmatism and cold negation is the 
upward, path that leads to a Spiritual Philosophy and the 
growth of natural religion, — the path of light and wis- 
dom, of pleasantness and peace. 



INTUITION. -THE SOUL DISCOVERING 
TRUTH. 

" As by footprints one finds cattle, so by soul one knows all things." 

Upanishad, {Hindu.) 

" Rolling planet, flaming sun, 
Stand in noble man complete." — S. Johnson. 

" We see into the life of things." — Wordsworth. 

MATERIALISM and inductive science ignore or be- 
little Intuition — a vital and important factor in the 
discovery of truth. They see man as a machine, his body 
evolving some curious mental results to cease with their 
physical cause, and this gives no fit conception of innate 
ideas or of intuitive powers. The spiritual thinker sees 
man as a microscomic being, in whom all forms and quali- 
ties of matter and life are centred, and into whose spiritual 
organization all the forces and laws of Nature are wrought 
and all divine ideas inwoven. Thus is he akin to Nature 
and to its Soul, and can reach out into all realms. 

Man interprets Nature, and for this there must be anal- 
ogy and likeness between the world within and about us. 
The interpreter is made up of the same substance and laws 
which built the world. We say a flower is beautiful be- 
cause the same genius of beauty which blooms in the flower 
had bloomed in the soul and looks out through our eyes at 
the lovely image which is its own kin and acquaintance. 
Mathematics, the exact science, is based on self-evident 

135 



136 INTUITION. 

axioms or statements. Why self-evident? Because they 
refer back to mathematics organized in the soul. 

A writer in the Banner of Light comments and quotes 
from Mrs. Mary F. Davis, on the relation of man to Nature, 
as follows : 

"The gifted writer proceeds to say that 'on the veiy summit of life 
Nature has reared the temple of Humanity. Low down, in the mineral 
kingdom, did she commence the pyramidal structure. Patiently, through 
long cycles of ages, she, our Mother, wrought; forming, combining, dis- 
solving, and reconstructing, placing deposit upon deposit, and strata upon 
strata, building up the vegetable kingdom on a mineral foundation, causing 
the complicated animal structure to spring from the vegetable world, link- 
ing motion to matter, life to motion, sensation to life, and intelligence to 
sensation, until at length man stood upon the apex of that vast and glorious 
mountain. So perfect was that chain of being that there is not an atom or 
element, not a force or form in all that unimaginable machinery of means 
but finds itself duplicated in this wonderful human structure, which is the 
end and culmination of all.' Yes, there is the whole secret. It is because 
we came out of Nature, and are its crowning work, that we acknowledge in 
so many ways as we do its subtile and profound connection with our lives. 
Our love of Nature need be no longer a secret. 

Mrs. Davis continues, in beautiful and impressive phrase : ' We are, then, 
truly related to the external universe by every fiber of our being, and j'et 
superior to it all. Hence that mysterious sympathy which we feel in solitary 
places — that deep, restful lull which contact with green fields and graceful 
trees will give us — that sublime joy of communion with mountains and 
stars — that dear consolation in sorrow and despair which comes in the voice 
of rushing of mighty waters — and, amid all, that feeling of supremacy 
over time and change which rises like an aroused spirit within us at such 
moments of contemplation.' And she aptly quotes some exquisite verses 
from saintly George Herbert, the following being the last : 

' More servants wait on man 

Than he '11 take notice of; in every path 

He treads down that which doth befriend him 
When sickness makes him pale and wan. 

Oh, mighty love ! Man is one world and hath 
Another to attend him.' " 

This fine statement of the microcosmic nature and wide 
relations of man will help us to see more clearly that the 
innate power to discover truth must be. Go back to old 



THE SOUL DISCOVERING TRUTH. 137 

Buddhist thought, and the idea of this gifted and intuitive 
woman — soul-knowledge — they held best of all. Of the 
sage they said: "All within calm and pure, without any 
blemish, who is acquainted with all things that have not yet 
transpired, who knows, and sees, and hears all things." 
This they call "illumination," and say that the soul has 
" divine ej'es, or a divine vision." Nothing is absolutely 
." unknowable," and the word, used in that sense, is an 
absurdity. Man's most clear and intense thought brings 
him en rapport with inner realities, so that truths of physi- 
cal science, as well as of morals and ethics, are revealed from 
within, while his external senses are closed and quiet. The 
soul mirrors and reflects the universe and lights up the way, 
so that the experimental scientist can follow, to test and 
verify the discoveries that intuition has made. 

To illustrate and prove the soul's power of discovery, I 
have gathered some significant historical evidences of im- 
portant theories and facts, now endorsed and demonstrated 
by science, but which we owe primarily to intuition. 

Some six years ago a learned Brahmin, A. Jayrim, Row 
(or Prince) of Mysore, lectured in St. George's Hall, Lon- 
don, to a brilliant English audience. He said : " The mod- 
ern theor}' of evolution is shadowed in the Vedantic resolu- 
tion, by ancient Hindoo sages, of all matter into one un- 
conscious, self-existent, and ever-changing principle." A 
legendary life of Buddha, by Wang Puh, a Chinese, GOO 
a. d., "holds to the eternity of matter as a crude mass, 
infinitesimally attenuated or expanded into the beautiful 
varieties of Nature ; " as Samuel Johnson tells us in his 
Oriental Religions. From him, too, we learn that the 
ancient Chinese account of the original condition of man 
foreshadows Darwinism, as "primitive men are shown in 
picture-books .as semi-human, and improve in their human 
shapes as we follow down the series." These are but hints 



138 INTUITION. 

and suggestions, as the sa3 T ing of some pre-Mosaic Egyp- 
tian : " All life originates in the egg," is a hint of proto- 
plasm, or as the old Chinese idea of the unity of man with 
nature hints that he is a microcosm ; but such intuitive sug- 
gestions are full of significance. " Coming events cast 
their shadows before," we are told, and these shadows come 
from within. Intuitions flash out in advance and light up 
the paths, that science ma}' follow with its fine tests and 
patient experiments. 

Nearly twent} r -five hundred years ago the Greek Pytha- 
goras first laid down the true theory of the planetary S}^s- 
tem, which was laid aside until revived by Copernicus. Tt 
stands accepted and tested to-da}', but it was an intuitive 
discovery with the old philosopher. The Eoman poet, 
Lucretius, nearly a century before Christ, gave us " the 
survival of the fittest " in his Latin verse : 

" The seeds of bodies from eternal strove 
And used by stroke, or their own weight, to move 
All sorts of union tried, all sorts of blows, 
To see if any way would things compose ; 
And so, no wonder they at last were hurled 
Into the decent order of the world, — 
And still such motions, still such ways pursue, 
As may supply decaying things by new. 
But more, some kinds must other kiuds replace, 
They could not all preserve their feeble race ; 
For these we see remain and bear their young, 
Craft, strength, and swiftness has preserved so long." 

Seventy years ago Joel Barlow, then our Minister to 
France, wrote a poem entitled "The Canal," and intui- 
tively foretold the telegraph. 

" Ah, speed thy labors, sage of unknown name : 
Hise into flight and seize thy promised fame. 
For thee the chymic powers their bounds expand ; 
Imprisoned lightnings wait thy guiding hand. 
Unnumbered messages, in viewless flight, 
Shall bear thy mnadates with the speed of light." 



THE SOUL DISCOVERING TRUTH. 139 

Tyndall says that the "emission theory" of light, held 
by Newton, Laplace, and others, was finally overthrown, 
in 1801, by Edward Young, an English Professor of Natu- 
ral Philosophy," and that "Young never saw with his eyes 
the waves of sound, but had the force of imagination to 
picture them, and the intellect to investigate them." This 
statement shows that the great discovery of the undulating 
theory of light, now held established by science, was first 
intuitive. His ' ' imagination " — intuition — apprehended 
the law and deduced the facts from it, which inductive ex- 
periment afterward verified. In the same intuitive way 
Young believed in ether, and early suggested the idea of an 
all-pervading, invisible, elastic substance, the existence of 
which is now an established theory of science. 

In 1791, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles 
Darwin, published, in London, a long didactic poem, " The 
Fiotanic Garden," which attracted much attention. A brief 
extract is significant. 

" Organic life beneath the shoreless waves 
Was born and nursed in ocean's pearly caves. 
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, 
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass ; 
These, as successive generations bloom, 
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume, 
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, 
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.*' 

Here is evolution, differentiation, origin of species — the 
discovery and the record in glowing verse of theories which 
his gifted grandson and others have toiled through years 
of investigation to confirm. All honor to their inductive 
work ; but shall the intuition of the earlier discoverer, who 
perhaps kindled the mind and lighted the path of his great 
descendant, be ignored ? 

In 1847, a poor boy, near Poughkeepsie, N. Y., who had 
scarce read a book in his life, and had but a twelve weeks' 



140 INTUITION. 

tuition in a most common school, gave "the evolution 
theory," with finer insight of its principles and grander 
comprehension of its results than we find even in Darwin, or 
Tyndall, or Yeoman's. In " Nature's Divine Revelations" 
Andrew Jackson Davis starts with " one great Positive 
Power or Mind" in all things, and says that in every parti- 
cle of matter is a representation and evidence of the divine 
laws which govern the universe. " In the stone you see 
the properties of the soil ; in the soil the properties of the 
plant; in the plant the properties of an animal.; in the 
animal you see Man, — and in Man you cannot see, but you 
can feel, the immortal principle." The laws of Nature, 
guided b}^ an indwelling mind, work on and up, — Matter, 
Motion, Life, Sensation, Intelligence, are his steps in the 
spiral pathway whose height looks out toward the spirit's 
immortal home ! No inductive scientist has grasped or 
reached so broad and lofty an ideal. They may ridicule it 
to-daj 7 , but future teachers of a more perfect and spirit- 
ualized science will accept it. It ma} 7 be said this comes 
from some spirit-teacher. He makes no such claim, but 
simply says he was in a" superior condition," where his 
mind and his interior faculties could act clearly and without 
hindrance from the outer world. It is the clear-seeing and 
far-seeing of the inner man. His fine statement, " The 
intention of Nature, everywhere manifest, is the perfection 
of man," is pure intuition waiting to be verified. 

There are credible witnesses to the fact that in March, 
1846, his words were written down (see Nat. Div. Rev. 
p. 261) : "The existence of eight planets has been deter- 
mined upon as nearly bej-ond all doubt. Still the eighth 
and ninth are not yet recognized as bodies belonging to the 
solar sj'stem." His mind, abstracted from outward things, 
as he was in a trance, was free for its work of subtile and 
far-reaching search and discover}-. Months after, the cal- 



THE SOUL DISCOVERING TRUTH. 141 

culations and conclusions of Le Verrier reached this coun- 
try, and in September the great French astronomer discov- 
ered the eighth planet, which he had decided must exist to 
make certain perturbations of the stars natural. Either 
the young man in New York had read his mind across the 
Atlantic, or had intuitively forestalled his calculations, or~ 
had this knowledge from some gifted spirit. 

That eminent English thinker and scholar, Henry Thomas 
Buckle, gave an Address before the Royal Institution in 
London, in 1858, on The Influence of Woman on the Prog- 
ress of Knowledge, full of suggestive thought and valuable 
information. He said : 

" They have exercised an enormous influence on the progress of knowl- 
edge, .... so great that it is hardly possible to assign limits to it 

If it were not for women, scientific men would be much too inductive and 
the progress of our knowledge would be hindered. There are many who 
will not willingly admit this proposition, because, in England, since the first 
half of the seventeenth century, the inductive method as the means of arriv- 
ing at physical truth, has been the object, not of rational admiration, but 
of a blind and servile worship." 

This is clear thought in terse and strong words. It is, 
too, a fine philosophical and psychological argument in 
favor of woman's influence, as a co-worker, in every realm 
of life and thought, showing how her mental and spiritual 
qualities must join with those of man to perfect societj 7 , 
religion, and government, as well as scientific and intellect- 
ual culture. He gives most interesting proofs of the value 
of this deductive power, some of which I quote. 

Of Sir Isaac Newton he says : 

" It is certain that his greatest discovery was deductive, in the proper 
sense of the word ; that is to say, the process of reasoning from ideas was out 

of all proportion large, compared to the process of reasoning from facts 

Sitting in his garden, an apple fell from a tree His object was to dis- 
cover some law; that is, to rise to some higher truth respecting gravity than 
was previously known. Observe how he went to work. He sat still where 
he was, and thought. He did not get up to make experiments, nor did be 
go home to consult observations made by others, or to collate tables. He 



142 INTUITION. 

did not even continue to watch the external world, but sat like a man 
entranced and enraptured, feeding on his own mind and evolving idea after 

idea His mind thus advancing from idea to idea, he was carried by 

imagination into the realms of space, and still sitting, neither experimenting 
nor observing, but heedless of tbe operations of nature, he completed the 
most sublime and majestic speculation that ever entered into the heart of 
man to conceive. See how small a part the senses played in the discoveiy. 

It was tbe triumph of an idea The cause of the discovery was in the 

mind of Newton." 

The great discovery was made in a single hour of intui- 
tive light, and the slow but sure process of twenty }'ears 
of experiments that followed tested it, and it stood. 

The law of crystallization had long been a perplexing and 
unsolved problem. 

" At length, late in the eighteenth century, a Frenchman named Hauy, 
one of the most remarkable men of that remarkable age, made the discov- 
ery, and ascertained that the native crystals, irregular as they appear, are 
in truth perfectly regular, and that their secondary forms are by a regular 
process of diminution; that is, by what he termed tbe law of decrement, — 
the principle of decrease being as unerring as that of increase. I beg you will 
notice how this striking discovery was made. Hauy was essentially a poet ; 
and his great delight was to wander in the Jardin du Roi, observing nature, 
not as a pbysical philosopher, but as a poet. Though his understanding was 
strong, his imagination was stronger; and it was for the purpose of filling 
his mind with ideas of beauty that he directed his attention first to the vege- 
table kingdom, with its graceful forms and various hues. His poetic tem- 
perament luxuriated in such images of beauty, his mind became saturated 
with ideas of symmetry, and Cuvier assures us that it was in consequence 
of these ideas that he began to believe that the apparently irregular forms 

of native crystals were in reality regular As soon as this idea was 

firmly implanted in his mind, at least half the discovery was made ; for be had 
the key to it, and was on the right road, which others had missed, because, 
while they approached minerals experimentally, on the side of the senses, 
he approached them speculatively, on the side of the idea. This is not a 
mere fanciful assertion of mine, since Hauy himself tells us, in his great 
woik on Mineralogy, that he took as his starting point, ideas of symmetry 
of form, and from those ideas worked down deductively to his subject." 

In this case again, experiment followed and verified the 
discovery. One more extract, full of significance and 
interest, must suffice. 



THE SOUL DISCOVERING TEUTH. 143 

" Those among you who are interested in botany are aware that the 
highest morphological generalization we possess respecting plants, is 
the great law of metamorphosis, according to which the stamens, pistils, 
corollas, bracts, petals, &c, of every plant, are simply modified leaves. 
It is now known that all these parts .... are successive stages of the 
leaf— epochs, as it were, of its history. "Who made this discovery ? Was 
it some inductive investigator, who had spent years in experiments and 
minute observations of plants, and had classified them that he might study 
their structure and rise to their laws ? Not so. The discovery was made 
by Goethe, the greatest poet of Germany, and one of the greatest of the 
world; and he made it, not in spite of being a poet, but because he was a 
poet. His brilliant imagination, his passion for beauty, his exquisite con- 
ception of form, supplied him with ideas, from which, reasoning deduc- 
tively, he arrived at conclusions by descent, and not by ascent. He stood 
on an eminence, and looking downward from the heights, generalized the 
law. Then he descended into the plains and verified the idea. When its 
discovery was announced by Goethe, the botanists not only rejected it, but 

were filled with wrath at the idea of a poet invading their territory 

A mere man of imagination, a poor creature who knew nothing of facts, 
who had not even used a microscope on the growth of plants, to give him- 
self out as a philosopher ! It was absurd ! . . . . You know the result : the 
men of facts succumbed before the man of ideas; even on their own ground 
the philosophers were beaten by the poet, and this great discovery is now 
received and eagerly welcomed by those veiy persons, who, if they had 
lived fifty years ago, would have treated it with scorn, and who even now 
still go on in the old routine, telling us, in defiance of the history of our 
knowledge, that all physical discoveries are made by the Baconian method, 
and that any other method is unworthy the attention of sound and 
sensible thinkers. The laws of nature have their sole seat, origin, and 
function in the human mind. They are simply the conditions under which 
the regularity of nature is recognized. They explain the external world, 
but they reside in the internal. As yet we know scarcely anything of the 
laws of mind, and therefore we know scarcely anything of the laws of 
nature." 

This narration of intuitive discoveries begins, but by no 
means ends, the list ; yet it may suffice. Before Columbus 
discovered the western hemisphere and bold sailors circum- 
navigated the globe, our knowledge of geography was but 
fragmentary, our understanding of climatic laws of no mo- 
ment. Wide realms of land and sea are yet unexplored, 
but we have taken their range and bearing, we know their 



144 INTUITION. 

mutual relations, — what ocean currents sweep past their 
shores, what winds stir their upper air, almost what rocky 
strata lie far beneath their soil or waters. Such general- 
izations as guides to further research were impossible, so 
long as only one hemisphere was known to civilized man. 
We have taken in both hemispheres, and rounded out our 
thought and methods. 

So in the realms of science, and ethics, and spiritual cul- 
ture. The inductive scientist and the materialist, ignoring 
intuition, or the transcendentalist ignoring facts and ex- 
perience, are like old Europeans, or red Indians of San 
Salvador, before the Genoese discoverer found them, each 
on their fragment of the earth, ignorant of other regions and 
incompetent to learn. Let the inductive scientist and the 
transcendentalist take in both hemispheres, recognize the 
inner and the outer life of man, give intuition and induc- 
tion due and fit place, and the one shall discover new con- 
tinents, and the other shall explore them and bring back 
their treasures to enrich and enlarge our life and thought. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 

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